Kyoto Off-Broadway Reviews

These works allow some self-congratulation, both for the play’s hammering on of a hard nut, and for your ticket purchase and bearing witness to an important work, but there’s so much showmanship involved that it dilutes the effect. The handsome British issue drama doesn’t trust you to be interested in a subject on its own terms, so like a good governess, it’ll provide more and more sugar to make the medicine go down. At a certain point, there’s so much sucrose in the recipe, you wonder if the health benefits are gone.

As urgent and vital as it is, an investigation into international angles on climate change doesn’t sound remotely theatrical, let alone a race-to-the finish thriller. But that is precisely what directors Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin achieve with Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson’s strikingly smart “Kyoto.”

“Kyoto” had its U.S. premiere Monday at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, and it is yet another British import filled with Big Ideas served up on a sterile monolithic set that screams “prestige” even before you sit down.

It all plays like a darkly comedic thriller, showing us how the diplomatic sausage is made that ultimately affects our very existence on the planet. Although there are occasional longueurs and scenes that feel more convoluted than necessary, the production proves so energetic and fast-paced that they don’t matter. This is the sort of evening in which one of the most exciting scenes features nothing more than two characters shouting adjectives at each other in a sort of linguistic duel to the death.

While Kyoto offers striking scenes and moments, often staged at a quick clip by its directors, the play remains a weighty work that’s not always engrossing in spite of the excellence of its actors, who do plenty of heavy lifting to keep it moving along. Once the show suddenly ends, the play’s somewhat foregone conclusion may well leave you flat, with only a bitter taste in your mouth.

The quartet of theater artists who put together “Kyoto” – writers Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, directors Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin — also worked together on The Jungle, an extraordinary immersive re-creation of a real-life refugee camp; Daldry and Martin also co-directed “Stranger Things: The First Shadow” No, there are no levitating people or disappearing ships, not even melting ice caps, and “Kyoto” is nowhere near as immersive as “The Jungle.’ But . there is a touch of audience immersion: We are all given a delegate or media badges to wear around our necks, and several theatergoers are enlisted to sit around the conference table as if important delegates. And the overall staging and the ensemble acting do turn this history lesson into an often engaging work of theater.

Playwrights Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson’s slow unveiling of the truth — that Don is not an everyman, but an oilman — is gratifying, leaving you mad enough to be inspired to act but not so depleted of trust that you can’t.

Kyoto is a unique theatrical experience, a hybrid of docudrama, political theatre, immersive theatre, and more. I learned more about the world climate change movement in that two-and-a-half hours in the Newhouse than I had from years of viewing media coverage. And what entertainment and insight it provided into the dynamic of international political negotiation!