'Blood and Gifts': Afghan-Soviet war

It is easy to imagine "Blood and Gifts" as an action-packed Hollywood espionage movie. This is both praise and a misgiving.

J.T. Rogers' spy-versus-spy-versus-spy drama, commissioned by Lincoln Center Theater but first produced at London's National Theatre, is an ambitious work that tells a chunk of pertinent recent history with clarity and intelligence.

But this is the sort of plot-driven storytelling that doesn't cry out for the special energy of live theater, a quality that kept me at an emotional distance I struggled not to feel. Rogers has written a well-researched, informative, reasonably engrossing 2¾-hour exploration of America's covert involvement in the Soviet Union's war with Afghanistan -- a misadventure often described as Russia's Vietnam.

We begin at the Islamabad Airport in 1981. Jim -- played with square-jawed all-American skepticism by Jeremy Davidson -- has arrived from Washington with a Cold War mission to support the Afghans. Just off the plane, he is accosted by a KGB agent (the endearingly duplicitous Michael Aronov), who knows more than Jim thinks about convoluted realities in a land where neither belongs.

Seated on three sides of a square stage are men in tribal garb draped with rifles from many lands, men in business suits looking arrogant and embassy men with desperate confusion on their faces and resentful wives back home. Pieces of furniture roll in and dates are projected to identify scenes.

Actors speak bursts of Russian, Pashto, Farsi and Arabic with impressive apparent fluency. Culture clashes pile up, and far-reaching mistakes are made. The play -- first produced as a one-act as part of London's 11-play cycle, "The Great Game: Afghanistan" -- is easier to admire than embrace.