Occupational Hazards
By Jonathan Kalb
Blood and Gifts
By J.T. Rogers
Mitzi Newhouse Theater
150 W. 65th St.
Box office: (212) 239-6200
In her splendid analysis of The Great Game
[published on HotReview],
the Tricycle Theatre's widely praised, eleven-hour cycle of plays about
Afghanistan set between 1842 and 2010, Erika Munk observes that, informative
as that earnest theatrical marathon was, it was also disturbingly complicit
with our current military involvement there. Yes, the plays asked critical
questions about western intervention, and taught valuable history about
the country to those who would never otherwise learn it, but almost
all the dramas nevertheless portrayed the Afghans as too brutal, backward
and corrupt ever to be left to themselves and thus implied that intervention
is and always was justifiable and unavoidable.
Because no play seriously considered the option
of the great powers simply not playing the fateful "great game," the
cycle ended up suggesting that occupying Afghanistan has always been
the quintessential white man's burden, no less for the United States
in 2002 than for the Soviet Union in 1979 and Britain in the 19th century.
Occasional atrocities by exhausted and overburdened troops were treated
as understandable occupational hazards. Small wonder high-ranking British
and American military officials praised The Great Game when
it was performed privately for them last year in London and Washington.
How one feels about J.T. Rogers's Blood
and Gifts--a full-length expansion of a one-act originally written
for The Great Game, now receiving a superb production at Lincoln
Center directed by Bartlett Sher--will very much depend on one's attitude
toward the complicity Munk describes. If, like me, you believe that
every penny and drop of blood America has expended occupying Afghanistan
has been disastrously squandered--and that this should have been obvious
from the moment Bush unilaterally declared 9/11 an act of war rather
than a crime--then Rogers's play may enrage you. The rage will be an
extension of the feelings that all of Bush's maladroit overreactions
fomented for eight years. If, on the other hand, you are a forgiving
"water under the bridge" type, if you think the putative good intentions
of well-meaning cowboy-patriots are interesting despite the horror their
ignorance and impulsiveness wreak, and that sensitive hindsight examination
of their motives can be the stuff of powerful lessons, then this might
be the play for you.
Rogers is nothing if not fair-minded. He has
interviewed experts to get his details right, as he told the Lincoln
Center Theater Review: "What would you eat if you went to a party
at the embassy? What are the kinds of things you would do? What would
piss you off?" Blood and Gifts is indeed impressively realistic.
It tells a touchingly compassionate tale about a well-meaning, square-jawed
CIA agent named James Warnock (Jeremy Davidson) who is bent on outwitting
the Pakistani ISI during the 1980s. Because the U.S., Britain and Saudi
Arabia want to arm the Afghan mujahidin against the Soviets secretly,
they give the ISI control over which commanders to support.
The ISI chief--slimy and arrogant--chooses a
bloodthirsty Islamist named Hekmatyar whom he thinks can be turned into
a puppet after the Soviets leave, and Warnock works behind his back
to arm a competing leader, Abdullah Khan, considered more humane and
U.S.-friendly. Advising and helping Warnock is a jaded, weather-beaten
MI6 agent named Simon Craig (exquisitely played by Jefferson Mays),
who is much more knowledgeable than anyone in the CIA and who lends
the play something of a soul by warning (ineffectually) about various
pitfalls. Brittle and ignored, Craig proves to be the hapless conscience
of the play, as all the awful things he predicts come about, most horribly
(because wholly avoidable) the power-grab by Islamic radicals after
America callously abandons Khan and all of Afghanistan in the wake of
the Soviets's withdrawal.
Blood and Gifts features slimy politicians,
duplicitous commanders, and ignorant goons on all sides. It is--I must
concede--refreshingly untendentious, marvelously researched (the embassy
food is utterly convincing), splendidly acted, and smartly directed,
with offstage characters seated at all times around the edges of the
stage as silent witnesses who occasionally confront others with meaningful
glances and gestures during entrances and exits. Like The Great
Game, Rogers's play is a fine teaching tool, serving up many books'
worth of complex and important history as entertainment. In that sense,
Blood and Gifts delivers as much as can be expected from its
particular genre of realistic historical fiction. It teaches historical
facts to people who would never seek them on their own and can thus
proudly claim the mantle of Enlightenment social benevolence.
As I make that concession, however, and tell
myself how much "better than nothing" Blood and Gifts was,
I find my thoughts drifting toward Trofimov's famous remark to Lopakhin
near the end of The Cherry Orchard:
… allow me to give you one piece of advice
at parting: don't wave your arms about! Get out of that habit--of
arm-waving. And another thing, building cottages and counting on the
summer residents in time becoming independent farmers--that's just
another form of arm-waving.
A play like Blood and Gifts, or the
one-acts of The Great Game, is, for all its good intentions,
the equivalent of dramatic arm-waving in our time. Yes, it teaches (selectively)
and thus lessens ignorance among the tiny group of citizens wealthy
and privileged enough to see it, but the very modesty and conventionality
of that ambition essentially dooms it to political ineffectuality, if
not complicity with intervention. This is the ideal sort of drama for
the History Channel age, when just about any atrocity, policy blunder,
public lie, or colossally wasteful expenditure can evidently be packaged
as inoffensive infotainment. One can almost guarantee before it opens
that such a play will be so inoffensive it can do nothing to impede
the massive and chronic misgovernment whose background it describes.
Shaw once said to an ambitious young playwright
who wrote asking for career advice that she should "do something to
get yourself into trouble." The historical avant-garde was entirely
built on that premise. Today, many say, artistic avant-gardism is moribund,
its energies dissipated by the leveling effects of media-age cynicism
and postmodernism. Whatever the truth of that, the Occupy movement shows
that the core idea still has traction. If you provoke people, even (especially?)
in the pseudo-serious era of Colbert and O'Reilly, they will pay attention,
and sometimes even be roused to activism. If you don't, they will stay
benumbed and asleep, even if you've gone to the trouble of teaching
them a few things.
Maybe it's idle to wish that Blood and Gifts
were some sort of fire-breathing polemic about the Afghan quagmire,
or a guerilla event that made news by, say, occupying public spaces
and getting people arrested. That, however, is where the active and
activist mind goes in a time like ours, contemplating savage political
games in plush theatrical comfort.