'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.

Bartlett Sher ("South Pacific") directs a big, accomplished cast -- 15 men and one all-purpose woman -- with an admirable economy that manages far-flung travel around Pakistan, America and Afghanistan from 1981 to 1991 while leaving characters the breathing room to be individuals.

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.

Jefferson Mays, the gifted star of "I Am My Own Wife," is especially touching as the long-suffering spy under cover of the threadbare British embassy. Bernard White has a majestic complexity as the Tajik warlord that Jim decides to back, while Pej Vahdat is humanely flawed as the young second-in-command with the love for American pop culture.

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.

WHAT "Blood and Gifts"

WHERE Newhouse Theater, Lincoln Center Theater

INFO $85; 212-239-6200; lct.org

BOTTOM LINE More informative than revelatory