Historical, Political, Personal
Following a Tony Award-winning Broadway run and critically lauded West End stint in 2017, J. T. Rogers' powerful political thriller is brought to life in Chicago in the hands of local non-profit theater company TimeLine. Showing at the Windy City's Broadway Playhouse for a strictly limited four week run this fall, the city-wide premiere puts faces and lives to the names that populate our history books, especially those behind the previously confidential, true-life negotiations of between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization in the run up to the Oslo Peace Accords of the early 1990s.
Whilst set against a sweeping historical landscape, Rogers' story is deeply personal, inspiring and surprisingly funny. It centers on Norwegian sociologist Terje Rod-Larsen and his foreign diplomat wife Mona Juul, two seemingly normal people who would become the quiet heroes of the Oslo negotiations. Able to bring people together in secretive back-channel manoeuvresc, Terje and Juul facilitated high level communications with the Norwegian Prime minister and what began in a castle in a forrest outside of Oslo ended in a symbolic handshake between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization Yassar Arafat.