UI grad’s award-winning play coming to Riverside Theatre in Iowa City

At first glance, “A Walk in the Woods” might seem like a period piece — a play reflecting a 1982 slice of the Cold War in which a pair of American and Russian arms negotiators took to the woods around Geneva, Switzerland, to get to know each other on a human level to better discuss how to de-escalate the nuclear arms race.

But celebrated playwright Lee Blessing, a Minneapolis native who earned MFAs in poetry in 1976 and playwriting in 1979 from the University of Iowa, is not at all surprised that his 1987 Pulitzer finalist- and 1988 Tony-nominated script continues to resonate with audiences and presenters around the world.

It rolled out in 1987, opened on Broadway in 1988, was produced at Riverside Theatre Iowa City in 1989, and is returning to Riverside from Jan. 26 through Feb. 12. Ron Clark — a Riverside co-founder who stepped out of a leadership position in 2015 — portrayed the American negotiator in 1989, and is directing the show this time around.

If you go

What: “A Walk in the Woods”

Where: Riverside Theatre, 119 E. College St., Iowa City

When: Jan. 26 to Feb. 12, 2023; 7:30 p.m. Thursday to Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday

Tickets: $15 to $35, Riverside Box Office, (319) 259-7099 or riversidetheatre.org/awitw/

Post show talkbacks: Feb. 5, with Miriam Gilbert, the cast and director; Feb. 10, with Ben Loehrke of The Stanley Center for Peace and Security in Muscatine; both events are free and open to public.

COVID protocols: Masks optional Friday and Saturday; masks mandatory Thursday and Sunday

Clark is amazed that his college friend "was so prescient as to know that 30-plus years later, this play would have such an immediate political resonance.“

“How did he know that? Because we are looking at this desperate situation in Ukraine. The Soviet Union is gone, but the dominant spirit of the Russian dictator is not,” said Clark, 72, of Iowa City.

“The play is about an issue that literally can't go away every time a human being thinks (about) a new military technology,” Blessing, 73, said by phone from his home in Los Angeles. “It never evaporates. We can still make bows and arrows, we can still make spears. We never forget weapons that we created.

“And once we got to nuclear weapons, that obviously has created a huge change in the way diplomacy works. But the weapons are never gonna go away. Someone's always gonna be stockpiling these kinds of weapons, which means the requirement to negotiate about it is always going to be there,” Blessing said.

Adam Knight, Riverside Theatre’s producing artistic director, sees the play as an important way to reflect on what’s happening in the world today.

"We're still grappling as a larger society with issues of globalization, of nuclear proliferation,“ said Knight, 43, of Iowa City. ”We’re still trying to figure out how to talk to one another, and how to understand personal motives, and also motives on a macro scale.

“But the play, for me, rose to greater urgency a year ago, when Russia invaded Ukraine. I was thinking we have to do a play that speaks to this somehow, and I asked myself what is that play? I was racking my brain and thinking maybe we could find something by a Russian or Ukrainian writer, and nothing was feeling quite right that I could find.

“And then, somewhere in my memory, this play was filed away. So I ran to my office and found my copy, and then ran back to my house and stayed up that night reading it. I think I finished it around 1 a.m. and knew that we had to do it.

“I knew that we had to do it not only because of these themes that are now suddenly very prescient, but also because of the relationships to Iowa and to Riverside,” Knight said, “because I knew that story has multiple points of connection to this place, and to this moment.”

Knight met Blessing in 2001 at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Conn., where Blessing was workshopping a play. Both returned the next year, so they spent two summers together, where everyone affiliated with the center socialized over meals and drinks, and attended plays and play readings. Their paths continued to cross in New York City in 2001, when Blessings’ plays were being presented at Signature Theater, where Knight was working.

“During that time, I interacted with him so much,” Knight said.

Winding back the clock even farther, Clark performed in the 1979 world premiere of Blessing’s play, “The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid,” when both were graduate students at the University of Iowa. The play traveled from the UI stage to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and was broadcast nationally on PBS. Clark and Blessing have kept in touch over the years, a relationship for which both are thankful.

Themes

Exploring relationships is at the heart of “A Walk in the Woods.” The script is far from a heavy-duty look at two superpower agents. It’s infused with humor, which Clark said also helps make the script relevant beyond the Cold War.

"There are moments that are just fall-out-of-your chair funny,“ he said. ”It’s also a deeply personal relationship that blows up the political issues that it explores. We have the most unlikely friendship that you can imagine: different ages, different cultures, different world views, opposing world views, who keep going into the woods to try to understand each other outside the constraints of the negotiating room.

“I love plays that explore what the world means on a very personal level, but explores the deep philosophical and political universals. This play is deeply political, but it's also deeply personal — deeply personal,” Clark said.

“And to me, that's the brilliance of writers like Lee blessing and Rebecca Gilman, and so many others that have come out of the University of Iowa playwrights’ program,” Clark said. “They can take an issue that is so universally, politically challenging, and put it into the simplest human terms so that we all go, ‘Oh, this is what this is really about.’ And we leave the theater with a deeper understanding of the human condition.”

Taking the action to the woods not only mirrors the real discussions between the arms negotiators, but is important to facilitate those private talks.

“I think these guys had to be as far off the local grid as possible to have the conversations that they were having,” Blessing said. “It also, I think, was just recreation — they were just taking walks. And they both realized that once they're isolated, they can actually have some honest conversations and explore what might be done, what might be possible.

“And, of course, it's very beautiful in Geneva,” he added. “I finally got there 20 years after I wrote the play, and there are plenty of wonderful places to go for a walk.”

For Clark, “the woods give perspective.”

“I know this from my own life. In troubled times, I've retreated to natural places where I can collect my thoughts and regain perspective and rediscover my own insignificance. This is not false modesty — this is just the truth — that I am comforted to discover my own insignificance in the world. I love to sit by the ocean,” he said. “I love to sit by the ocean and rediscover the vastness and relentlessness of the ocean. That’s where I am most at peace.”

The setting just calls for a bench in the woods, and the Riverside team decided to present the play in the round, with the audience circling the two players. Blessing applauds that idea, allowing the audience to become the forest, which is the third character in the play.

“I think doing it in the round would be rather ideal,” he said. “It's a very simple play to do in the round — there’s a bench and a few entrances and exits. Any good director can move people around well enough for the entire audience to be satisfied.”

The unconventional staging also presents challenges to the cast and crew.

“You have to find ways to keep opening the actors up to all sides of the audience — and there are only two of them. You've got to keep people moving, you have to be very clear in the reasons to move,” Clark said, since the actors otherwise could spend a lot of time sitting on a bench.

Moving the actors around the space in a motivated manner “makes psychological sense when you see it,” he added.

New directions

Clark was 39 when he played the American, John Honeyman, and now he’s directing Martin Andrews in that role, along with Tim Budd as Andrey Botvinnik. Knight said he thought of Clark right away to direct the play, and gave Clark everything he asked for, hiring two of his favorite actors and his favorite designers from past productions.

Not only is Clark seeing the show from a new perspective, but having veteran professional actors makes his directing job “joyful.”

“The thing that's wonderful about it, is that when we hit a snag where you're trying to figure out exactly what's going on in a particular moment, it's a three-way conversation, because both of these actors respect each other deeply and are also just whip-smart, both of them,” he said.

“And so the three of us will say, ‘Well, what about this?’ ‘What about that?’ And in a matter of a couple of minutes, you can solve literally any problem because everybody gives and takes without any hesitation or any ego saying, ‘Well, this is my line, why are you talking?’

“All three of us are tight enough that we can do that, and that's pretty swell. We have that rapport, and it makes my job joyful and easier.

“I like to think that as a director, I've gotten to be more patient over the years, and more accommodating to actor perspective. I hope that I have — I think I have. That allows for me to have a lot more fun,” Clark said.

“I don't assume I'm the smartest guy in the room — I've never really gained anything by making that assumption.”

Comments: (319) 368-8508; diana.nollen@thegazette.com