NEW YORK _ "Oslo" is the kind of big-picture, big-cast, fact-based political storytelling most often created by British playwrights and eventually imported to much Broadway acclaim.
Only this time, the engrossing if not terribly deep three-hour drama about little-known international history was commissioned here by the Lincoln Center Theater. American playwright J.T. Rogers and director Bartlett Sher had such off-Broadway success with the premiere last summer that it has been catapulted upstairs to the Beaumont, the company's Broadway showcase. In a pleasant bit of turnabout, the loving, meticulous, psychologically superficial work heads to London's National Theatre and the West End in the fall.
The subject is the secret back-channel negotiations that happened for more than a year in and around Norway, of all places, from 1992 to 1993, culminating in that iconic photo of Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shaking hands in the White House Rose Garden with President Bill Clinton after the signing of the Oslo Accords.
Unknown, apparently, to the clueless big powers, the events leading up to the first-ever agreement were improbably engineered by a Danish diplomatic couple _ Terje, a sociologist with a theory (Jefferson Mays, winsomely manipulative) and Mona, a deputy foreign minister (Jennifer Ehle, gracefully no-nonsense).
The political making of sausage is legendarily not a pretty sight. Here, it is also pretty talky. Still, Rogers, Sher and their generous, fine cast do much to lighten the agonizing back-and-forth of the rogue operation with convivial, unlikely scenes of eating, joking and drinking among fierce adversaries.
Sher, along with set designer Michael Yeargan, costume designer Catherine Zuber and others of the creative team from Sher's "South Pacific" and "The King and I," know how to make a spectacle feel intimate. A spare, elegant rotunda transforms from city to city, room to room, via expert projections that change the texture of the walls. A formal double door separates the serious talks from the casual mealtimes, where Terje forbids political discourse and much jollity is centered on the Danish cook's waffles.
Thus, while official peace talks are getting nowhere, these unknown neutral parties have persuaded the exiled PLO finance minister (the formidably compelling Anthony Azizi) and a humorless PLO Marxist (Dariush Kashani) to participate. At first, Israel sends two small-time, declasse academics (Daniel Jenkins and Daniel Oreskes, less foolish than off-Broadway), and then a high-stakes player (Michael Aronov, insolent and full of life).
Rogers' play still has a plot-driven Masterpiece Theatre quality. It is ambitious and serious, but not too serious to draw blood about a peace process that, spoiler alert, has never worked.
