Blood and Gifts

J.T. Rogers’s 'Blood and Gifts' arrived Off-Broadway at Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater in 2011 as a gripping, panoramic, and politically fierce historical thriller tracking the shadowy origins of contemporary global conflict. Spanning a turbulent decade between 1981 and 1991, the narrative turns a series of secret bunkers, embassy offices, and desert safehouses into a high-stakes, real-time chessboard, following a pragmatic CIA operative who is dispatched to Pakistan to orchestrate the covert weaponization and funding of the Afghan mujahideen rebels against the Soviet army. Directed with clock-stopping tension by Bartlett Sher, the acclaimed production starred Jeremy Davidson, Jefferson Mays, and a brilliant international ensemble.