Annapurna is a killer mountain in the Himalayas, but “Annapurna,” Sharr White’s play that opened at the Peterborough Players this week is not about mountain climbing. Its main characters are a poet named Ulysses and his former wife, Emma, who have not seen each other in 20 years; their only son is searching for the father he can’t remember, but “Annapurna” is not about Homer’s “Odyssey,” either. However, this harrowing, hilarious, and finally heroic story borrows from both.
This is concentrated drama. It’s only 90 minutes long (there is no intermission), and all the action takes place in and around a battered travel trailer in the foothills of the Rockies. From its windows, Ulysses can watch climbers attempt to scale Mt. Gunnison. Most of them have to be rescued when they find themselves “stuck and scared” on its heights.
That’s the problem for this tortured pair, too. They cannot go back to a happier past as a loving couple. They can’t seem to move forward, either, out of the wreckage of their current lives. They are stuck with each other, and with the mystery of what happened to them. He literally can’t remember; she can’t bring herself to tell him what she can’t forget.
Disclaimer: I have worked with both of these actors, and I respect them. So you may take with a grain of salt my assertion that these are the finest performances I have ever seen from them and among the finest I have ever on this stage.
The Greeks believed that each human being contains both a hero and a monster, and that each individual life is a struggle to see which will be the master. “Annapurna” puts you on the edge of your seat, leaning forward, to see the outcome.