J.T. Rogers’ play about a daring real-life peace mission delivers for audience,
What would it be like to change the world? Probably thrilling and probably also a lot of hard work.
J.T. Rogers’ Tony Award-winning play dramatizes the backroom negotiations that led to the 1993 Israel-Palestine peace accord, masterminded — improbably enough — by the Norwegian sociologist Terje-Rod Larsen (Blair Williams) and his diplomat wife Mona Juul (Marla McLean).
The play is based on fact and most of the figures in it are real people. Theatrical creativity enters the picture in Rogers’ imaginings of the experience: the key players’ motivation, the balance between individual personality and professional/ national loyalties, the frustration when things hit an impasse, the elation when hurdles are overcome. We all know the peace barely held, which lends
Oslo a quality of an aspirational, nostalgic fable: remember when such hope was possible?
At two hours and 45 minutes including intermission, it’s undeniably a long evening, but Joel Greenberg’s production is pacy and elegant.
It is a big-cast play, with some of the 13 performers playing more than one role, which means that credible characterization must be established quickly. The challenge, which Greenberg ’s production doesn’t always meet, is for the characters to come across as re- al people, not as sets of personality traits. Such humanization could have blunted the edges of what is a pretty macho representation of how stuff gets done in politics: men work hard and shout at each other, then make up over bottomless tumblers of Johnnie Walker and waffles lovingly prepared by the only woman in the room (Sarah Orenstein, as housekeeper/cook Toril). That may be how things really happened, but it’s an aggressively masculine vision that could be rendered more subtle by the performances.
A complex question that Rogers explores throughout the play is Larsen’s and Juul’s stakes in hatching this plan. This came about, it’s explained, when they visited Gaza and witnessed two boys, Palestinian and Israeli, in an armed standoff, and saw an identical expression of fear and resistance in their faces. The desire to create a “different narrative” for these boys and their cultures sparks the idea to create a secret channel for negotiations.
What is likely to attract audiences to this play is also what will keep them engaged in it: that this improbable story of world-altering political negotiations in the Norwegian woods is actually true. Despite the backsliding and carnage that’s happened since the Oslo Accord, Larsen implores the audience to keep believing that progress is possible. Whether or not you choose to believe in his optimism is one of the potent debates that the production is likely to spark.