The indelible image of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat shaking hands in the White House Rose Garden, as a smiling President Bill Clinton looks on, appears on video near the end of J.T. Rogers’ “Oslo.”
But neither man is represented among the 21 named characters who appear on stage in the sprawling play, which takes us deep into the unlikely true tale of the “back channel” negotiations that led to that handshake on September 13, 1993 — spearheaded by a sparse team of Norwegian facilitators and held in secret, all while official, American-led peace talks stalled.
So Rogers sets himself a tough challenge from the start, given that we know more about the future than his characters do: that they will succeed in the near term, culminating in that historic handshake, and also that the peace brokered by the Oslo Accords will be short-lived.
Rogers’ task, then, is to make the diplomatic process itself dramatically compelling — to make the various personalities and the negotiations about negotiations lively enough to hold our attention for nearly three hours of information-dense stage time. That he largely succeeds feels almost as unlikely as the events of the play itself.
Unless, that is, you’re familiar with Rogers’ previous work. He’s one of the rare American playwrights who consistently engages with global politics — an arena most of our dramatists seem content to leave to their British cousins, even though American theaters clearly have an appetite for it.
And in plays like “The Overwhelming,” a wrenching recounting of the events leading up to the Rwandan genocide of 1994, and “Blood and Gifts,” an examination of the CIA’s role in the Afghan-Soviet conflict of the 1980s, Rogers shows a knack for combining deep research with strong dramatic instincts to illuminate complex topics without rendering them textbook-dry.
Here, his way in to the Oslo talks is through two of their primary players. Rogers interviewed Terje Rød-Larsen and Mona Juul, the real-life Norwegian couple (he a sociologist, she an official in the Norwegian Foreign Ministry) who initiated the secret meetings, and they become our guides as well, with Mona (a warm but no-nonsense Bri Sudia) providing the narration that keeps us oriented within the timeline.
Uri Savir (Jed Feder, standing right) shares updates about the negotiations with his superior Yossi Beilin (Stef Tovar, standing left) and the Norwegians Terje Rød-Larsen (Scott Parkinson, seated from left), Johan Jørgen Holst (David Parkes), and Mona Juul (Bri Sudia) in TimeLine Theatre Company’s Chicago premiere of “Oslo.”
Brett Beiner
As the play opens, Terje (Scott Parkinson, nicely embodying the mien of a man who’s decided to write himself into history) and Mona are hosting a dinner party for another couple, Johan Jørgen Holst (David Parkes) and his wife Marianne Heiberg (Juliet Hart). Holst is Norway’s newly appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs; Heiberg is Terje’s colleague at the Fafo Institute for Applied Sciences. (As Mona wryly notes in an aside to the audience, it’s a very small country.)
Suddenly the phone rings — actually, two phones ring. It’s Israel and the PLO calling, and Terje and Mona are forced to reveal the unauthorized plan they’ve already set in motion, hoping for Holst’s support. But as we later learn, not everything is quite as it appears here; Mona turns out to be a master manipulator — a handy skill for a diplomat, it seems.
Terje’s driving philosophy is to get representatives of the two parties into a space free of intermediaries, press scrutiny and other outside pressures, where they can begin to see one another not just as ideologies but individuals. To recognize their human commonalities, he believes, will create room for common-sense negotiations. Facilitating this approach includes shared meals, cases of Scotch, and the apparently remarkable peacemaking power of warm waffles.
The participating individuals are carefully chosen, since it’s officially forbidden for the state of Israel and the PLO to meet directly. But among those we get to know best over the course of the negotiations are Ahmed Qurie (Anish Jethmalani), the PLO finance minister, and Uri Savir (Jed Feder), an Israeli Foreign Ministry official who affects a rock-star swagger. The moment of bonding they share at the close of the play’s first act might be an homage to Lee Blessing’s “A Walk in the Woods,” another play about international diplomacy on a personal scale.
As it happens, Nick Bowling staged that play for TimeLine Theatre Company in 2011. And in 2013, he directed Rogers’ “Blood and Gifts” for TimeLine — and that production convinced Rogers that Bowling and TimeLine were the right match for “Oslo,” though the company has borrowed Broadway in Chicago’s Broadway Playhouse to match the outsized scale of Rogers’ tale.
It’s a big moment for TimeLine, which recently announced plans for a new permanent home in Uptown, and Bowling and the company take strong advantage of the wider exposure with a swiftly paced and smartly acted production.
Rogers does occasionally get bogged down by detail; even as much as he’s condensed the actual history, his script is rife with static phone conversations, and we probably don’t need to see every single return to the negotiating table. But it’s a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at a remarkable moment. And as Terje points out to Mona in a wistful coda, their peace may not hold, but isn’t it something that they created the possibility?
Kris Vire is a local freelance writer.
