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Certainly relationships, of the committed, long-lasting kind, are the same way, White tells us, and he draws constant parallels between the two throughout the terse but shaky 95-minute evening. The feelings shared by Emma and Ulysses (played by real-world married couple Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman) are as imposing, and often as insurmountable, as the Nepalese peak that gives the work its title. Equally important, though, is the word's other reference to the universal Hindu goddess of food and wealth. That would be Emma, who arrives unannounced at Ulysses's ramshackle trailer in Paonia, Colorado. She encounters Ulysses frying sausage naked except for a short leather apron and an oxygen canister strapped to his back, and finds herself welcomed by neither him nor his always-barking dog, Jennifer. There's understandable surprise in his reaction: "I had no expectations," Ulysses blurts in a dry, messy drawl reflecting his voice's disuse, "of anybody. At all. Ever again." He has two sound reasons for thinking that: He's in the final stages of emphysema, a bandage still covering up the incision from a recent lung operation, and Emma left him in the middle of the night 20 years ago, and took their 5-year-old son with her. Ulysses had written countless letters to the one address he had—her mother's—but is even only connecting with Emma now because their now-adult son, Sam, learned by way of a private investigator that Dad doesn't have too long left, and didn't want him to die without seeing him again. Ulysses has no memory of that last night; he was a serious alcoholic at that point, and blackouts were common. (It was a similar blackout, after leaving Emma and Sam, that scared him sober—though, as that led him to his five-pack-a-day cigarette habit, the jury's still out on how good a move that was.) He's always blamed her, and, he knows, she's always blamed him, but which (if either) of them was and is right, and whether their marriage and joint career (he was a poet, she his editor) should have been given up is their particular unfinished business. Though White's dazzling New York debut was with the jagged medical drama The Other Place, Annapurna is in the more conventional mode of The Snow Geese (seen on Broadway in the fall), an idiom with which the playwright is less comfortable and that leads him to more by-the-numbers plotting. The dying hermit, the nurturing Earth Mother, the shocking secret that both unites and divides them—there's not a ton of innovation or color to be found, and their absence is notable in a show that wants us to accept Emma and Ulysses as something other than your ordinary couple. The jejune discussions that fill most of their time, alas, don't paint them as much of anything else. She organizes his cupboards and complains about the cockroaches, he defends buying five pounds of spoiled meat from the dollar store and struggles to reclaim the affection he's long buried. These typical problems don't sit easily against the situation White has laid out; there's nothing to identify the high-minded Ulysses as the type to flee to the Rockies, or the defensively domestic Emma (she and new her husband bought a dry cleaning franchise) as the type to track him down there. Nor does White successfully justify why we don't see Sam, or even why he doesn't replace Emma as the second character—he's depicted as, by far, the only one of the three generally interested in a reconciliation, and Emma's ongoing insistence that he's arriving soon rings hollow. That would, of course, give White fewer avenues for meditating on the unusual strength of the marriage bond, which is the show's most obvious goal, and make for a slimmer vehicle for the lead performers, but it might also lead to truer conflict. (Sam is the chief reason Emma left the way she did.) Even so, Mullally and Offerman are a tart, dynamic comic pairing, who easily escape the confinement of light caricature that's thrust upon them. (Ulysses is an overly grizzled lumberjack type who's unusually well turned out given his inability to even put on a shirt; Emma's dyed, bobbed hair and thick-rimmed glasses are more of a parody of an intellectual type than the urbane New Englander White describes.) From their first meeting, when their eyes lock, they convey the passion and resentment of the decades lost, affection and rage warring to come to the surface. As Ulysses and Emma spend more time together, Mullally and Offerman pick up the pacing to the point they finish each other's sentences and thoughts, and slowly rebuilding the credibility and trust the pair lost long ago. It takes both performers longer than it should to shed the outward silliness—right up until the final scene—but when they do, the result is touching and tragic, a testament of how it can sometimes be as easy to grow together as it is to fall apart. Director Bart DeLorenzo, artistic director of Odyssey Theatre Ensemble in Los Angeles, for which Mullally and Offerman debuted in the play last year, could sand down some of the rougher edges leading to that point, making the trek a bit smoother and more realistic to be in keeping with the elaborate set (by Thomas A. Walsh) that really does look like a refuge against the elements. The actors are carrying more weight than they should making White's unsteady conceits work. But Mullally and Offerman do provide it nonetheless, and make Annapurna a fascinating and enriching outing from that standpoint. No one suggests that Ulysses could—or should—return to what was, but they hint at the possibility that what lies ahead doesn't have to be worse. There can be return journeys and frostbite isn't always as permanent as it was for the men who first scaled the titular peak: Open your heart and trust yourself, and you can find warmth even in the coldest places.
Annapurna
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