Sharr White’s ‘Annapurna’ at Theatre Exile

We meet Ulysses, sweating the heat of a Colorado summer out in a trailer, hooked up to the oxygen tank that keeps him breathing and stripped down to a Tonto-like loincloth. He talks loud, acts loud, and is distinctly unfriendly to his ex-wife Emma, who turns up without warning on his doorstep after a 20-year separation.

She seems not to be holding it together very well herself, having deserted another husband with a few bags and the $17,514 in cash that represent the entirety of her worldly possessions. You want Ulysses to cut her a break, at least until we can figure out her story, but he has little apparent curiosity and less patience. Ulysses may seem boorish, but which of us would welcome an unannounced visit in triple-digit heat from an ex whom one hasn’t heard from for two decades?

Poet as mountain man

In Homer’s Odyssey, another character named Ulysses is reunited with his wife after 20 years. The Homeric version puts the hero through a long adventure at sea before casting him back on his native island, where he finds his faithful spouse waiting for him. Ours being a different time, it’s the ex-wife who comes home to a former husband who asks her what the hell she wants.

Emma, who exhibits the bruises of a recent beating when she changes into a cooler frock, can’t answer that question, either for Ulysses or herself, but she does have an excuse for the visit. It seems that Ulysses’s stepson Sam, with whom he’s also lost contact, has tracked him down and is coming to visit — will in fact arrive momentarily, although he and Emma too are estranged and traveling separately. This scenario sounds a bit fishy, but then the whole setup is, especially when Emma buys groceries and starts to play house.

The story of their bygone marriage emerges in fits and starts of questioning and recrimination. In between, Emma continues to tidy up and try to get Ulysses into clothes of some sort. At first, one wonders what Emma, a genteel and educated sort, can have to do with this broken-down mountain man (a very good Pearce Bunting), who seems unable to speak in anything but a roar. It’s he, though, who’s the educated fellow: a college professor of English and a poet of some at least former renown. What’s more, although Ulysses tells Emma he’s written only one poem in the past ten years, it turns out to be a 150-stanza epic called “Annapurna,” after the mountain whose south face is reckoned to be the deadliest ascent in the Himalayas. The real subject, he confesses, is Emma herself; and what ex-spouse, pitying and already half in love again, can resist such an offering?

By contrast, Sam Shepard

In many ways, it’s too late for this pair; Ulysses, having drunk his way out of a marriage and a career and smoked his way to emphysema and cancer, is a short-timer. In another sense, of course, it’s never too late for love, and whatever the future may hold, Ulysses and Emma have found a way back to each other. This story line could be saccharine, but White’s edgy script captures the nuances of despair behind his protagonists’ façade and the bleak humor of the situation as well.

We’ve heard this before; American theater often seems preoccupied with dysfunctional families, from O’Neill, Williams, and Miller to Albee and Shepard, and echoes of Shepard are particularly pronounced here. But White is enough his own man to add a worthwhile voice. If Shepard were writing this play, Sam the son would show up and blow both his parents to smithereens, but White never does bring Sam into the proceedings, however he may haunt them. Maybe he’ll arrive for the sequel.

Catharine Slusar as Emma is a particularly well-etched study of a woman coming to terms with her own life even as she helps reconcile Ulysses to his. The pauses and silences between the two are as eloquent as anything they say; language, here, is not only a scalpel that cuts as it heals, but also a bridge between two solitudes. The real work going on is best expressed in the shape of a gesture and the slope of a shoulder. Joe Canuso’s direction was particularly sensitive to the rhythms of the script, and the indirections — now slow, now abrupt — of its characters’ dance around each other. Thom Weaver’s set captured the white trash ambience of Ulysses’s trailer, and the intimate space of Theatre Exile’s Studio X served the play well. Plaudits to all concerned.