Long Trek Ends With ‘Walk’ on Broadway

It’s been a long gestation, but after 14 months of labor, director Des McAnuff and his La Jolla Playhouse team have finally brought the San Diego hit “A Walk in the Woods” to Broadway.

Lee Blessing’s play, which originated under McAnuff’s direction at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Conn., is a witty and touching dialogue on arms control. It takes fictional license with the historical conversation and agreement of a pair of American and Soviet arms negotiators during an informal “walk in the woods” they took outside the official Geneva sessions in 1982.

The breakthrough by Paul H. Nitze and Uli A. Kvitsinsky was later rejected by both governments, and the political reasons for that are at the core of the play.

This is the second Broadway venture for the 5-year-old La Jolla Playhouse and its first New York foray with a dramatic play. In the spring of 1985, “Big River,” the Playhouse’s musical version of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” picked up seven Tony Awards, including best musical and best director for McAnuff.

The New York version of “A Walk in the Woods,” which opened Sunday at the Booth Theatre, is virtually the same as the one that received four awards from the San Diego Critics Circle, including best production and best director.

There are a few notable exceptions, however. The two San Diego leads, Lawrence Pressman and Michael Constantine (who won the best actor award in San Diego) have been replaced by Sam Waterston and Robert Prosky, respectively, and about a dozen lines were inserted by Blessing to reflect the latest news about a possible U.S.-Soviet arms treaty.

It has not escaped the attention of Robert Blacker, the associate director and dramaturge of the La Jolla Playhouse, that the deadline for Tony nominations is in early April--the results will be announced in May--or that this show, which was highly acclaimed in its San Diego and New Haven incarnations, may be a serious contender--at least as far as most of the critics are concerned.

Reflecting on the New York reviews, Blacker said from New York that there is only one thing he would change about this production.

“The critic of The New York Times.”

The critic, Frank Rich, gave the show one of its two bad reviews to date. (The Bergen Record was the other--although no one is losing sleep over that, according to Blacker.)

But reviews overall have been positive. Howard Kissel of The New York Daily News hailed the show as “a splendid evening of theater,” Clive Barnes of the New York Post praised it as “a play that suggests intelligence as well as emotion, and puts a questioning echo where its laugh is,” and John Beaufort of The Christian Science Monitor predicted that “it may well prove the most provocative play of the season.”

Still, when Rich summed up the play as “plastic”--from the relationship between the men to the look of the flowers that pop up on the dirt stage during one scene, Blacker was “surprised and disappointed.”

“His reaction is curious to me because the relationship between the two men was so clearly moving to audiences in New Haven, where it first premiered, and subsequently in San Diego,” Blacker said. “I am baffled by his lack of response to those characters.”

McAnuff was not available to comment because he left this week for a nine-day vacation with his wife, actress Susan Berman, in the Caribbean. And playwright Blessing (of whom Barnes said “The theater should count this singular Blessing as a new potential force”) is busy working on “A Quality of Tears,” about an American hostage in Beirut, for the Playhouse’s upcoming season. “A Walk in the Woods” is Blessing’s first Broadway play.

Despite Blacker’s talk of disappointment over the New York Times review, much of his animated conversation was peppered with the words thrilling and exciting.

“The most moving thing for me on opening night was to see Des surrounded by a series of artist-friends, many of whom have worked, or have expressed interest in working, at the La Jolla Playhouse,” Blacker said.

“This includes John Malkovich and his wife, Glenne Headly, Kevin Kline and Bill Irwin, all celebrating the opening of a serious play on Broadway--something that is a rarity these days,” he said.

“And to be able to see a group of people in whose hands the future of the American theater rests brought together in celebration of this occasion, well, I think it was a great example of the fraternity . . . of the theater world that when we have something to be proud of, we can come together.”