One of Broadway's more exciting offerings this month is being served way down at the Access Theater at 380 Broadway, an off-off-Broadway house several miles south of the official "Broadway" district. Up three long, ancient wooden flights of stairs in a former sweatshop, a superb drama of international intrigue is playing. And literally speaking, it's on Broadway. So there.
Conversations on Russian Literature has all the elements of the great suspense stories of our age: two characters sitting in a park talking.
This one-act is the second and more substantial half of an evening of plays by David Johnston. Sitting on park benches — not even taking a walk in the woods — an American negotiator (Jonna McElrath) and an old Russian general (Frank Anderson) toss hot potatoes back and forth: their intellectual pursuits (hence the title), their personal histories, their own place in history, their practical and inner motivations for meeting.
By itself, this play is worth more than the price of admission. Skilfully, with music-perfect pacing, and with huge help from two superb performances and Gary Shrader's subtle, unobtrusive direction, the playwright reveals who these players really are and what brings them to this strange crossroads.
The setting is very specific: "The Patriarchs Pond in Moscow, Summer 2004, early evening." The time is important — less than two years after the Moscow theater hostage crisis, a turning point in Russian history, in which the authorities used an "unknown chemical agent" to free hundreds of hostages from Chechen terrorists. 
But one needs only a dim awareness of recent Russian history to appreciate this tense, funny production, just as one doesn't need to be familiar with the works of Turgenev, Bulgakov, or Chekhov, all of which are referenced as these two unforgettable characters probe for each others' soft spots. While very intellectually and historically aware, this play stands on its own merits.
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