There are those comparing the
espionage narrative that drives Blood and Gifts (at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi
Newhouse Theatre) with the work of novelists Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. And
while those two worthies—and their most famous heir apparent, David
Cornwall (better known by his pen name, John Le Carré)—are certainly hovering, I think the writer most
evoked by playwright J.T. Rogers’
script is the equally gifted but somewhat less celebrated David Ignatius. For
one thing, Mr. Ignatius is an American writer, like Mr. Rogers (the others are
British). For another, Mr. Ignatius, as both journalist (he writes for the Washington
Post) and novelist specializes in the Middle East as an espionage
arena. Finally, Ignatius has a sense of humor that is particularly American in
its wry mordancy.
What
all the writers share—including, happily, Mr. Rogers—is a sense of
authenticity. Where Mr. Rogers is unique is being the one who is not per se an
insider (though his father was a political scientist).
The
outline of the play is simple enough, or should I say, deceptively simple
enough. American agent James Warnock (Jeremy Davidson) has been tasked with creating an alliance with a
group of Afghans who are anti-Soviet freedom fighters, said alliance involving
the sale of weapons. It seems like a fairly straightforward relationship to
forge; but the freedom fighters are not necessarily friends of the military
government run by Colonel Afridi (Gabriel Ruiz), and the tenuous relationship with the Afghani
fighters may not be good for the “special relationship” between the US and
England, as personified by British diplomat Simon Craig (Jefferson
Mays); and maybe the Russians, as
personified by diplomat Dmitri Gromov (Michael Aronov) are only the enemies for now. (Rogers also has a
CIA supervisor character named Walter Barnes [brilliantly played by John
Procacino], a crusty old timer with an
unsentimental view of the business and a mordantly funny way of expressing it.
He represents a time-honored trope—the deskbound pro who sees the angles
in all their geometrical complexity and subtlety [think Le Carré’s George
Smiley or Brian Freemantle’s Charlie Muffin]; and as it happens he’s also very
reminiscent of an Ignatius character named Hoffman, who turns up as a
supporting player [albeit always with a different first name] in each of the
novels.)
Though
there are a lot of guns on display in Blood
and Gifts, none of them go off, for to
actually have one onstage character shoot another in this circle of operatives would create clean boundaries,
and this is an environment of insidious and unpredictable ambiguity, in which
not only is it perilously difficult to read the signals; it’s just as intricate
and elusive an art to know precisely what signals you’re sending.
This
tight little intrigue is directed with a tautness to match by Bartlett Sher, played to perfection by the ensemble, and may be
the best play of the season so far. Nice to have a real “thinker”—that
can also make you feel, however unsettlingly—every now and again…
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