THEATER REVIEW ‘A WALK IN THE WOODS’ : Protocol Break : The informal conversations of two arms negotiators take center stage in a virtuoso Solvang production.

I’ve often wished that in times of international crisis the President, his Cabinet and congressional leaders would duck out of their brainstorming sessions and grab dinner at some restaurant serving the cuisine of the current world hot spot. It would be one way to counteract the abstractions of other people and cultures that slide across Washington desks in half-page briefs.

Human beings are as real as the intellectual realm of strategic planning, but all too often they get filtered out in a rush to assimilate the daily onslaught of information.

Lee Blessing’s strikingly original “A Walk in the Woods” comes as close as theater can to restoring that balance and revealing adversarial politics in its full human dimension. The current staging by PCPA (Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts) Theaterfest serves the play admirably with a virtuoso production that will surely rank as one of the year’s best on the central coast.

Loosely based on a real incident during the 1982 Intermediate Range Nuclear Force Talks, the play deals with a pair of U.S. and Soviet arms negotiators in Geneva who break with protocol and meet for a series of informal conversations in an attempt to forge a meaningful agreement.

Along the way, their walks in the woods evolve into a deeply personal dialogue set against a backdrop of potential thermonuclear holocaust.

The senior, more experienced Soviet negotiator Andrey Botvinnik is played with such warmth and humor by Anthony DeFonte that he immediately enlists our sympathy, although he can prove a teddy bear with claws if provoked. He explains that he suggested the walk simply to see the woods, relax and ignore things--not to negotiate. “Be frivolous with me,” he pleads.

Andrey’s directness amazes John Honeyman, his stiff, younger American counterpart (Jonathan Gillard Daly), who can’t believe that his adversary would forsake formality for frivolity.

“Formality is simply anger with its hair combed,” prods Andrey.

“All conversations should serve a purpose,” Honeyman insists.

But try as Honeyman might to keep their conversation on issues, Andrey brings in personal details--loose threads on his suit or the big nose of the Reuters correspondent--and despite his caution Honeyman finds himself charmed by Andrey’s intimate style.

But in the human arena, black and white hats are hard to find. As the play progresses, Daly takes us behind Honeyman’s reserve to his passionate yearning to make a difference with their negotiations. “If we don’t believe in our power to save ourselves, then everything dies,” he says. “Idealism is no longer a choice for mankind--it’s a necessity.”

For Andrey, years of negotiated stalemate have all but extinguished hope. His amiable good humor masks a drought of the soul, symbolized by the dehydrating disease that forces him to moisten his eyes frequently with Visine tears.

It would be difficult to run aground with Blessing’s text, which abounds with humor, poetic images and quietly asserted passions (always the most powerful kind). But Daly and DeFonte bring every nuance from these characters to make their growing friendship palpably real. Their success is especially noteworthy in a two-character dramatic format that requires rigorously unbroken focus--in this production not a single volley goes unreturned.

In the staging, guest director Kirk Boyd (from Ashland’s Oregon Shakespeare Festival) has wisely played to his strengths--a gifted cast and the Solvang Festival Theater’s intimate theater-in-the-round winter configuration--drawing us in without unnecessary ornamentation.

Jack Shouse’s simple but meticulously detailed set design and Theodore Michael Dolas’ understated lighting evoke the feel of the passing seasons in the pair’s four meetings.

The most remarkable achievement of this stunning piece is that its convincing depiction of an individual friendship never obscures the larger issues behind it. In the same way, its poetic side is never indulged at the expense of a relentlessly sobering realism (“It’s not always pleasant to discover what you’re here for,” Andrey observes at one point).

Both our hearts and heads are thoroughly engaged as we accompany these two to their ultimate confrontation with the black truth that Andrey has known all along. Yet he has been moved by friendship to try to make a difference anyway, and in that lesson lies the human connection that must be reclaimed in international relations. Without it, even the post-Cold War political landscape will be a very chilling one.

* WHERE AND WHEN

“A Walk in the Woods” will be performed Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. through March 23 at the Festival Theater in Solvang, which has limited seating. Tickets are $15. Call 800-221-0469.