Word: playwrighting
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That poignant valedictory, like almost everything else in A Walk in the Woods, has the ring of political truth. Playwright Lee Blessing apparently was inspired by a real-life walk in the woods, between U.S. Negotiator Paul Nitze and Soviet Delegate Yuli Kvitsinsky, during arms-control talks in Geneva in 1983. His wry and engaging new work at the Yale Repertory Theater in New Haven, Conn., persuasively imagines the human fabric of a similar fictional enterprise. Blessing's conceit is that the Soviet negotiator, far from a stereotypical xenophobe, is worldly, glib and cynical, while the American newcomer is stuffy...
Fortunately the Alley Theater has found a playwright who knows better. Pulitzer Prizewinner Beth Henley knows the limits of the form, and her Am I Blue. proves it. The other half of this double bill, however, suffers by comparison...
...Playwright Dervis places his two main characters in close quarters--an Amtrak dining car on a train from Chicago to San Francisco. Tom (David Frisch) is a Yippie turned corporate executive. Founder of The Advocate, a left-wing newspaper, he is headed to the West Coast in order to sell its current mainstream incarnation. Busily writing out proposals, he is joined rudely by Spence (George Saulnier), a self-proclaimed, 17-year-old "romantic drifter." What Time charts three hours of their relationship, and falls straight into the one-act trap of revealing every silly detail about the pair...
When we first meet the young protagonist of A Nite-Lite, acted with appropriate repulsiveness by the playwright, he is returning home from work, dressed respectably in suit and tie. His initial encounter with the motionless, battered body beside his front door arouses his sense of pity. He addresses the formless mass politely as "sir," and even brings out a plate of food. But as the homeless person fails to acknowledge these gestures, the young man grows increasingly annoyed and impatient. He begins throwing scraps of food at the human heap of rags and soon dumps the entire plate...
...covering ground blazed by Stoppard, Beckett and Pirandello, but he is covering it well. (Interestingly enough, last year was the fiftieth anniversary of the latter's death, and A.R.T.'s artistic director Robert Brustein designed this season as a sort of tribute to Italy's greatest dead playwright...