Courtesy New Haven Theater Company
After a long pandemic-induced hiatus, the New Haven Theater Company has returned to its digs in the back of EBM Vintage on Chapel Street, with its first full-scale production in two years, as John Watson directs fellow members J. Kevin Smith and Susan Kulp in Sharr White’s Annapurna, which run Thursday through Saturday, May 12 to 14 and 19 to 21.
Annapurna is set in a seedy trailer in Paonia, Colo., a town of less than 1,500 persons situated in a valley dominated by Mount Lamborn. The play takes its name from an even grander mountain: Annapurna, in the Annapurna mountain range in Nepal, was the first 8,000-meter peak to be successfully climbed (in 1950), though it has also been for some time something of a byword for fatalities as well.
The mountains align, so to speak, in the viewpoint of Ulysses (Smith), a down-at-heels poet, former professor, and sufferer from leukemia who is, we learn, at work on an “epic poem” called Annapurna. His trailer, in the shadow of Mount Lamborn, is shared with a mangy dog who craps regularly on his floor and can be heard vociferously protesting a major change that happens as the play opens: Ulysses’ long-lost wife Emma (Kulp) appears in his doorway with several suitcases.
Watson points to three different incarnations of the versatile troupe over the years, but one thing that has remained a constant is the company’s feel for character-driven work. Watson, who also acts with the company, directed Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter and co-directed Retreat from Moscow with fellow member Margaret Mann in 2018 and 2019, respectively. For Watson, NHTC features the “consistently best” actors he’s ever worked with, and the opportunity to direct is a “major factor” in his membership. As with the above plays, Annapurna’s small cast and interior set indicate a conscious choice, Watson says. “We wanted something we wouldn’t have to stress to cast,” matched with a set not too demanding.
Fair enough — but NHTC’s ability to transform its black box space into a variety of places has also become something of a trademark in recent years. Watson cites fellow NHTC member (and husband of Susan) George Kulp as “a magician” in his ability to work up a set. Bus Stop, Rumors, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest come to mind as impressive instances of NHTC productions with sprawling sets and sprawling casts. The claustrophobic set for Annapurna, designed by Smith’s wife Donna Glen, is likewise key and was “fun to distress,” Watson says. What’s more, the play’s two characters seem tailor-made for NHTC regulars J. Kevin Smith and Susan Kulp. And fortunately for Watson, the two agreed as soon as they read the play.
Watson says he’s unsure who first brought Annapurna to his attention. As he pointed out, the company has a dedicated following who often suggest plays they’d like to see performed, or plays that match NHTC’s strengths. Annapurna was first produced in San Francisco in 2011, then was revived Off-Broadway in 2013, a period when the author had a couple plays on Broadway starring notable theater actresses like Laura Berlant and Mary-Louise Parker. Which indicates something likely to attract NHTC to Sharr White’s work: good parts for good actors.
And yet, as Watson said, “not everyone” in NHTC “loves every play” they put on. Some members of the company, which has to agree unanimously to any play NHTC offers, had some doubts in this instance. Watson, who calls Annapurna “the funniest play ever about a man dying of cancer,” says there was a concern about some of the darker elements of the play. Watson admits Annapurna is “a very tough show,” but in his pitch insisted upon the play as “powerful” and, while both characters can be “hard to like,” he feels that audiences will find the characters’ journey — through “fear, anger, and pity” — worthwhile.
In the play, Ulysses and Emma haven’t met in 20 years, ever since the night when Emma fled from their comfortable home with their 5‑year-old son Samuel. For decades Ulysses has sent unanswered letters to the home of Emma’s mother, addressed to his growing child. Now, it seems, the son is in search of the father he doesn’t remember and has found out Ulysses’s whereabouts. He’s on his way to visit, and Emma has arrived as a kind of herald to help Ulysses get his act together. Yet even she didn’t expect to find him so impoverished and slack.
The play’s initial scenes are a series of quick blackouts that might lead us to expect a comedy, and that’s where Smith’s portrayal of Ulysses is all to the good. He’s put out to see his wife after all this time, but he’s also amused at her dismay at the condition he’s in. Her efforts to upbraid him tend to become the basis of a perverse sort of self-defense, such as his acceptance of an ant infestation as nature’s way of checking out if he’s dead yet.
Smith, for whom bluster and an erratic manner have marked some of his memorable performances in the past, finds a through-line in Ulysses that makes him testy, interesting, and exasperating. He’s content with his own dissolution as a way of fate getting even with him, and Emma’s reappearance lets him contemplate how extreme his position is. It gives him something of a lift. Meanwhile, her intrusive comments make him take stock of himself in a way that stirs up elements of self-pity and rage that make Ulysses a seething cauldron of emotions Smith cooks up with glee, much as Ulysses does his spoiled sausages.
Indeed, Ulysses’ first response to Emma’s appearance is outrage at what he sees as her abandonment of him and kidnapping of their child. He knows he was a serious drinker but also that he was never given a chance to make good. Much of the play is concerned with learning what has become of Emma and Sam in the interim, which includes her marriage to a lesser poet — at a Providence community college — whose jealousy over the glowing embers of her love for Ulysses finally caused a violent outburst. We might expect a late-in-life rapprochement for Ulysses and Emma who — as Watson says — had a “grand passion” and have spent 20 years living out its aftermath.
The play is at its strongest when it looks at how the peaks scaled in the past can throw an indelible shadow over the present. But White has structured the play to lead to a big reveal, and that not only colors how we see what we learn about these two along the way, but means we have to accept Ulysses’s rather preposterous interpretation of what might have happened that night two decades ago. Since it would be unforgivable to give the truth away in a review, there’s a certain restriction in addressing the plot. Suffice to say the emotional effects of the events are brought home very powerfully in Ulysses’s breakdown, but the facts in the story tend to undermine, retrospectively for us, his sense of himself.
Key to the production’s success, however, is that these are two of the best roles Smith and Kulp have assayed, and are a highpoint in acting for both. Kulp’s Emma is strong and often caustic, but with a weathered vulnerability that becomes more poignant as the play goes on. Kulp and Smith are on stage throughout the entire 90-minute run time, and how they watch and react to each other with looks and body language creates a form of dialogue that adds so much drama to White’s lines. Many moments are full of charged feeling, often with Ulysses choking on the force of his own outbursts, giving Emma telling moments to muse and regard the lifetime of feelings that find her in his presence.
Lively, searching, searing and unabashedly human, New Haven Theater Company’s production — in the hands of Susan Kulp, J. Kevin Smith, and John Watson — has put Annapurna on its map.
Annapurna runs at New Haven Theater Company, 839 Chapel St., from May 12 to 14 and May 19 to 21. Visit the company’s website for tickets and more information.