Oslo

Content Advisory

SYNPOSIS: This 2017 Tony Award-winning play takes a fascinating look at the secret back-channel talks that resulted in the 1993 Oslo peace accords between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

LANGUAGE: In the heat of tense private negotiations between two groups who have been waging war on each other for most of the twentieth century, the principal characters employ a significant amount of strong language in the play, principally the use of the four-letter Anglo-Saxon obscenity, enough to qualify the play for an “R” rating.  Specifically, the language includes many uses of the word “fuck,” (used often as an exclamatory oath), as well as one or two uses of “shit” and “bullshit,” “piss” and “pee,” “son-of-a-bitch” and “asshole,” and “Christ.”

SMOKING/DRINKING: The negotiators spend months together negotiating, but also adjourn for dinner every evening, where wine and other alcoholic beverages are consumed. There is a reference to Turkish cigarettes in the script, so cigarettes may be smoked.

SEX: None.

VIOLENCE: Other than one shoving match, there is no violence in the play, although there are repeated references to the historic brutality and bloodshed that defines the Middle East.

FOR WHICH AUDIENCES? This play examines a fascinating historical event and will be appreciated by all patrons with an interest in foreign policy, world peace and the use of diplomacy rather than war to achieve peaceful ends. The strong language employed throughout the play will be discomfiting to conservative audience members, and while students should see the play as an illumination of one of the major flashpoints of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, teenaged audience members should attend at a parent’s discretion. The play is above the heads of pre-teens.

RATING: The show would be rated “R” for strong language.