A BLESSING ON BOTH THEIR HOUSES

LA JOLLA — Strange, how plays come to life. On July 1, the La Jolla Playhouse was rehearsing Lee Blessing’s “A Walk in the Woods,” about a Soviet nuclear arms negotiator and his American counterpart trying to get to know each other in a Geneva bosque. (It opens today.)

On the same day, news reports flashed over the airwaves: A breakthrough may have been reached in the current talks on eliminating intermediate-range and short-range nuclear weapons in Europe.

Two days later, the Soviet foreign ministry denied that any such breakthrough, formal or informal, had occurred. President Reagan’s men, Moscow suggested, were painting “an unjustifiably radiant picture” of the ongoing arms control process.

Maybe an American and a Soviet had indeed agreed on such a proposal. Maybe their superiors had dashed the idea. Maybe not. But it was as if Blessing’s characters, John Honeyman and Andrey Botvinnik, had taken possession of the bureaucrats playing the delicate chess game in Switzerland.

“Frustration is the word,” said Blessing, as he sat in a comfortable, shell-white sofa in the playhouse’s upstairs lobby after a lengthy rehearsal.

“The negotiators’ job seems to be to sit on their hands for 10 years and then work out a framework for a political agreement between the two superpowers which doesn’t really make the world safer.

“It’s easier, I think, for them to see the philosophical side of matters, because to have that job is to be frustrated.” Blessing was thinking of his two men, burdened with impossible ritual, yet somehow able to strike the idealistic chord in the other.

Some cynics in the audience may not be convinced by the ray of personal hope suggested by “A Walk in the Woods.” Think of the gray technocrats who graft the techniques of political illusion onto what is fundamentally a military problem.

But, in Blessing’s mind, Des McAnuff’s Yale Repertory production last February served the play so well that its proposition of hope proved convincing. (There, McAnuff directed Kenneth Welsh and Josef Sommer; here, he’s still directing, with Lawrence Pressman and Michael Constantine.)

“A Walk in the Woods” convinced enough people that it won this year’s American Theatre Critics’ Assn. annual $1,000 award for outstanding play produced in a resident theater, as well as being named by that association as one of the four best regionally produced plays of the past year. It was also a close runner-up (losing out to August Wilson’s “Fences”) in the Pulitzer Prize for best play of 1986-87.

Blessing feels, if not blessed, lucky. “You always hope,” he said, “that what you write will get a strong response. I seemed to have landed this time out on a subject that people are caring and thinking about. When I first started it, I wasn’t so sure.”

Perhaps that initial sense of doubt springs from the fact that this new work represents Blessing’s first political play after a distinguished line of dramas with a more intimate, domesticated view.

They include an early pair of one-acts, “Nice People Dancing to Good Country Music”; “Independence,” about a family of Iowa women, and “War of the Roses,” a caustic, ironic view of a married couple teetering on divorce’s precipice. “Oldtimers’ Game” (staged two months ago at Long Beach’s International City Theatre) observed the locker room of a baseball team in transition.

Looking back in retrospect, this slender, 37-year-old playwright with large blue eyes and a relaxed, unpretentious manner is pleased at both his work habits (“I’ve completed about a play a year since 1980”) and the results of that work (“They’ve all been published and have received significant regional productions”).

Blessing, now living with wife Jeanne Blake in his native Minneapolis, has deliberately situated himself in the center of the country, “safely, you might say, between the two coasts, and away from their distractions.”

It seems that Blessing decided on the writer’s path some time ago, when he attended Reed College in Portland, Ore., and thereafter at the near-legendary University of Iowa graduate writers’ workshop. Even though he achieved a double degree in poetry and playwriting there, he doesn’t conceive of his subsequent work for the stage to be some experiment in fusing the two mediums.

“Well, my poetry was never written in a style that called attention to itself, and that’s certainly true of my writing for the stage,” he noted. “But I do try for a poetry in my plays, nevertheless. It’s a dramatic kind, the poetry of the right phrase at the right time, within a context of realism. I love certain plays that use language for a very artful effect, but that’s just not what I’m doing.”

What Blessing is doing is pushing himself into unfamiliar territory. “After finishing ‘Oldtimers’ Game’ and ‘The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid,’ I realized that I had written only about men and that I was shorting myself.

“Jeanne sort of woke me up to many women’s concerns, and I started to see the world more from her perspective. So I wrote ‘Independence,’ ‘War of the Roses,’ and ‘Eleemosynary,’ another play about women. And what surprised me was that it was easier writing from a woman’s point of view than a man’s.”

But given American playwrights’ remarkable reticence to tackle political subjects, the next jump to “A Walk in the Woods” was likely the riskiest for Blessing. Call it thinking about the unthinkable.

The title derives from the 1982 “walk in the woods” discussion between Paul Nitze, representing the United States, and Yuli A. Kvitsinsky, on the Soviet side. In a private talk in the Swiss forest, the two reached an informal agreement on a severe reduction of short-range and intermediate-range weapons in Europe. Moscow and Washington, as usual, rejected it.

“What seemed crucial,” said Blessing, “was that this play convey a sense of the 40-year history of arms control negotiations and their inability to corral the arms race. My strategy was to pull us into the political debate through a human story that fascinates and amuses.”

So Botvinnik, a wearied Geneva veteran, wants only to talk about frivolous things: Babe Ruth and the color of ties. It’s his idiosyncratic expression of desperation, and it literally disarms Honeyman, whose first high-level talks these are.

Most subversive of all, Botvinnik wants to be Honeyman’s friend. Honeyman isn’t so sure he wants to return the favor.

“Instead, he thinks it’s another sly tactic,” said Blessing. “In a way, the real negotiation in the play is between the two of them, to reach some personal understanding. Honeyman distrusts, but because he’s the younger one and full of great-sounding proposals, he has this idealism about him. It’s their opening to each other.

“It wasn’t my purpose to point a finger at the U.S. or at the U.S.S.R., and say that one of them is the reason for this incessant stalemate. It isn’t that simple.

“It’s more a matter of certain processes taking over and institutionalizing a kind of paranoia, which is mutually held--and not just out of fear. There are cynical reasons as well. Having the most arms, for instance, enhances our place in the world. It’s nice to be king; other countries fear both superpowers. There’s a very primal and real attraction there.

“This has been, but really isn’t, a problem for the high priests. It’s a problem to be solved by millions of people.” Unlike many artists, Blessing doesn’t hesitate offering what he thinks his work’s message is:

“You can’t just file this issue away and resign yourself to thinking that our representatives in Washington are taking care of things. Because they’re not! They’ve fallen into a hole.”