"Blood and Gifts': Afghanistan's tragedy at Lincoln Center

Nothing has explained the tragic implications of American involvement in Afghanistan better for me than the program insert for Blood and Gifts.

Maybe that's the problem with J. T. Rogers's overly ambitious play, which opened this week in Lincoln Center's intimate Mitzi Newhouse Theatre. If you hope to dramatize the excruciating events in that strife-torn region during the charged decade of 1981-91, you'd better have more than two and half hours to do so (as well as give your audience a reading list in advance so that they can prepare).

But we all know you can't hold a contemporary audience that long. So if you're a dedicated, determined playwright— as Rogers clearly is— you're better off choosing your battles— literally— and focusing on just one of them.

Last season, the London-based Tricycle Theatre got away with dramatizing the continuing tragedy with The Great Game: Afghanistan, an epic nine-hour evening consisting of 12 one-act plays commissioned by contemporary playwrights, covering events from 1861 till today. And Tricycle pulled it off— quite successfully, in fact— holding its audience captive in an all-day marathon by warning up-front that its subject matter was way too vast and complex to handle in Shakespeare's prescribed "two hours traffick."

But that was last year, and this is this year, and we haven't come any closer to solving Afghanistan, have we? So Rogers's heart is in the right place, and "Attention must be paid," as Arthur Miller put it. Still, it's a struggle to sort out what you've got by the end of the evening, since Rogers seeks to cover so much historical ground.

Fools rush in

The first act deals with the intricate, Machiavellian web that the CIA began to weave in that strife-torn region, starting in 1981. After those other proverbial fools (the British and the Russians) rushed in where angels fear to tread, enter the Americans, in the persona of the CIA agent James Warnock. He's there to fulfill his assignment— namely, to supervise his agency's Pakistan counterpart, the ISI, as it passes U.S. weapons to Afghan insurgents to fight against the Russians, who are trying to occupy their country.

The deception game Warnock plays is a dangerous one. To accomplish his goal— "winning"— he must make friends with all the players and in turn negotiate with them, manipulate them, even spy on them. These players include a British MI 6 officer, a Soviet KGB agent, a Pakistan ISI official, a mujahadeen leader, and Warnock's own boss at the CIA. During the frenetic first act, we struggle to identify who's who.

Fortunately, the production's gifted director, Bartlett Sher (of South Pacific fame) keeps all the dramatis personae seated in a three-quarter configuration around the stage as the story unfolds, to help clarify what's happening as scenes and years whiz by with dizzying speed.

Lying to Congressmen

Why are the Americans here? "To do the right thing" is Warnock's repetitious mantra. Toward that goal, he gains the confidence of Abdullah Khan, an idealistic, truth-telling mujahadeen resistance fighter, and then in turn teaches Abdullah how to lie to an American Congressional committee, all for the sake of getting more arms.

"I give you my word," Warnock keeps saying, promising his new Afghan friend that he'll get what he wants as long as Abdullah "does what's he's told," just as Warnock himself is instructed to do by his own boss.

By the second act, the play finally settles in, and its key themes reveal themselves. "All we have is our word and our faith," says one player.

But what does a man's word mean in a world where you don't really know whom you're dealing with? Who is James Warnock, anyway, other than a man doing his job, just like Simon, the British agent, and Dmitri, the Russian agent? What distinguishes one from another, in the end?

Fragility of friendship

Blood and Gifts succeeds best when it puts a human face on the tragic struggle in Afghanistan. The three foreign agents talk about their absent families— Dmitri's worry over his teenage daughter, Simon's fear of fatherhood, Warnock's struggle to become a father— and the shape of a play finally begins to take form: It concerns the fragility of friendship and the fundamental futility of foreign involvement. (Abdullah, whose trust and friendship Warnock has won, consoles him, promising him that he will have sons, urging him to keep his faith.)

Ultimately, Blood and Gifts asks: What is the value of that friendship? By 1991 the Russians have withdrawn; Dmitri returns to Moscow; Warnock returns to the U.S.; Simon retreats to Islamabad— and Abdullah is left alone to face the fallout of the internal struggle that continues to tear his country apart.

"You've been watching too many CIA movies," agent Warnock remarks at one point. The final moments of this well-intending play do indeed make a more worthwhile evening than an evening at the cinema. Those moments provide the answer to a rhetorical question that was raised by Matthew nearly 2,000 years ago but remains undiscovered by most government functionaries: "For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, and loses his soul?"