Israel-Palestine conflict goes mano-a-mano in Marin Theatre Company’s ‘Oslo’

For the three hours of “Oslo,” the stakes remain unchanged. Accomplish an impossible task, somehow, magically, or all the secret negotiations leading to the 1993 Oslo Accords will fall apart, sending the Israel-Palestinian peace process back to square one, or making it even worse off than it was before.

At the same time, the stakes of J.T. Rogers’ Tony-winning play are also constantly changing, because each impossible task only breeds another one. Find someone who can credibly represent Israel when its laws bar its officials from meeting with the Palestine Liberation Organization. Get two men from opposite sides to walk into the negotiation room when one can’t even make an innocuous remark about the weather without dredging up decades-old wrongs. Conceal the whole process from top Norwegian officials who would think it was crazy, and persuade everyone who needs to know about it to risk losing their jobs.

The show’s Marin Theatre Company West Coast premiere, which opened Tuesday, Oct. 3, is a master class in the procedural thriller. In “Oslo,” the Oslo Accords are never an ungainly, endlessly complicated operation, spanning many months and countless names, as they are in the historical record. Rather, the show sticks ruthlessly to the single, intimate, human interaction that matters in the present moment: de-escalating a blowhard, convincing a skeptic, deflecting an intruder, soothing a wounded ego.

The mano-a-mano also drives the diplomatic philosophy of Terje (Mark Anderson Phillips), the Norwegian behind the accords, even though he’s not even a government official. But his wife, Mona (Erica Sullivan), is, and Terje (pronounced Tie-yuh), has little compunction — at times, too little — about combining her savvy and resources with his ambition and moxie as well as the altruism they share. His process “is rooted not in the organizational but in the personal,” he says. That means adversaries work behind closed doors without a facilitator; it means they drink together afterward and learn about each other’s families.

Rogers defines his array of characters as crisply as his situations, with single lines so finely chiseled they etch out the entire lives behind them. The cast, directed by Jasson Minadakis, bring aching, tremulous humanity to the text. When Israeli Professor Yair Hirschfeld (Brian Herndon) greets PLO Finance Minister Ahmed Qurie (J. Paul Nicholas) — as the first Israeli Ahmed has ever seen in the flesh — Herndon offers each phrase as if it’s an infant he’s leaving at the mercy of a deity. Nicholas gives Ahmed an exquisite, I-knew-that-already cool, but one whose facade cracks at opportunities for righteous indignation or sentimental antics.

Norwegian mediators Mona Juul (Erica Sullivan, left) and husband Terje Rød-Larsen (Mark Anderson Phillips) speak with Israel and the PLO.
Photo: Kevin Berne, Marin Theatre Company
As Mona, Sullivan has to act the part of a saint for most of the play, but even without the character flaws that make roles so juicy, she finds dynamism as the play’s moral center, her eyes fathomless wells of both terror and resignation as she stands in judgment of everyone around her and of herself.

Corey Fischer effortlessly commands as Shimon Peres, taking hold of a room as if it all fit in the palm of his hand. Charles Shaw Robinson makes delectable the narcissism of Johan Jorgen Holst, Norway’s foreign minister; when Mona and Terje stroke his ego, he accepts the tribute as if it’s the most natural and obvious thing in the world. As Uri Savir, the first Israeli official with whom the Palestinians negotiate, Paris Hunter Paul brings bombast worthy of an action movie. When he shuts the door on the Norwegians, he narrows his eyes as if to say, “No more Mr. Nice Guy.”

“Oslo” doesn’t exaggerate the positive impact of the Oslo Accords. Rogers is careful to point out the violence that erupted almost immediately after the treaty was signed. But nor does the show wholly despair of peace, even as the promise of the accords remains unfulfilled 25 years later. It is clear and unsentimental, balanced and methodical. Yet it also slyly asserts that our best shot at peace rests on the opposite — on humankind’s eternal, heedless optimism and ability to connect with one another, no matter what the cold, hard facts say.

Stressed are the peacemakers in gripping ‘Oslo’ at MTC

They often say you wouldn’t want to see sausage being made, and the same could be said of diplomacy. Peacemaking can be a messy, messy business. It is, however, extremely entertaining to watch in “Oslo,” the Tony Award-winning 2016 play by J.T. Rogers now making its West Coast premiere at Marin Theatre Company.

“Oslo” is about the top-secret back-channel negotiations in Norway between Israeli and Palestine Liberation Organization representatives that led to the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords, which didn’t resolve the long-standing conflict but was a landmark agreement hammered out between the PLO and the Israeli government.

Even the initiation of the negotiations itself is portrayed in Rogers’ fictionalized telling as a rogue operation by one Norwegian married couple, sociologist Terje Rød-Larsen (Mark Anderson Phillips, amusingly brash, egotistical and charismatic) and diplomat Mona Juul (coolly composed Erica Sullivan). On their own initiative they get the separate parties beginning to talk about talking and provide a safe and remote space to simply get people in a room together to try to find common ground.

It’s fascinating to watch the Palestinian and Israeli representatives quickly go from nervous semi-hostility to jovial camaraderie as they negotiate and socialize together in MTC artistic director Jasson Minadakis’ tense and often very funny production. It helps that we mostly see them outside the meeting room, unwinding together in the spacious sitting room of Sean Fanning’s spare and versatile set.

J. Paul Nicholas is charming but prickly as the PLO finance minister, meeting first with Brian Herndon as a nervously friendly professor of economics. They’re soon joined by Ashkon Davaran as a scowling Palestinian communist and Ryan Tasker as another, boyishly timid Israeli professor. Pair Hunter Paul is boorish at first as the first Israeli official in the room, and Peter James Meyers is bullheaded and overbearing as Israeli legal adviser Joel Singer.

Charles Shaw Robinson is imperious and volatile as the Norwegian foreign minister, who has to be carefully eased into the loop. Former Traveling Jewish Theatre artistic director Aaron Davidman is cagey and low-key as the Israeli deputy foreign minister who keeps his distance, and TJT cofounder and longtime Marin resident Corey Fischer exudes amiability and tremendous presence as foreign minister Shimon Peres. Joe Estlack and Adam Niemann are amusingly stony-faced as a pair of security guys.

The excellent cast of 14 is made up of a whole lot of men in suits, and Rogers seems to make an effort to give women a presence in the play with limited success. Mill Valley’s Marcia Pizzo deftly plays an array of women from a dubious colleague of Terje’s to an officious Swedish hostess, but the closest any of them come to playing a real role in the story is the kindly housekeeper whose waffles everybody rhapsodizes about.

More curiously, everybody talks up how essential Mona is to the process, but we’re never shown that in the play. It’s her “beautiful, powerful Rolodex” that makes setting the meetings up possible, and she occasionally serves as narrator just to explain who some people are in fill-in-the-blanks asides to the audience. In terms of what we actually see in scenes, however, the negotiations seem to be entirely Terje’s show.

When Norway’s deputy foreign minister (Tasker, agitated and enthusiastic) says he’s going to need to drop out of the proceedings, it’s confusing because as far as we’ve seen he hasn’t been doing anything besides being one of the very few people who knows this is going on. But that’s true of Mona as well. We mainly see her talking her husband down and cautioning him when he’s going too far. Although we’re often reminded that she’s the one with the government career on the line, she’s cast here in the oft-seen role of the long-suffering wife who supports her husband’s big dreams.

There are occasional moments where the playwright shows his hand a little too conspicuously, especially in the final monologue, but on the whole it’s a smartly constructed and thoroughly engaging piece that gives a real sense both of the sweep of history and the small, personal moments that somehow kick it into motion.