Theatre in Review: Annapurna (The New Group/Theatre Row)

	Nick Offerman, Megan Mulally. Photo: Monique Carboni

The playwright Sharr White tips his hand in the first moments of Annapurna. The lights come up on the spectacularly cluttered trailer interior designed by Thomas A. Walsh. Nick Offerman, as Ulysses, the trailer's occupant, is standing there, nude except for a backpack and an apron and holding a skillet. Standing in the doorway is Emma, his ex-wife, who screams. "I wasn't expecting anybody," he says, by way of explanation. "It'd be a little weird if you were," she wisecracks. The line is funny, especially as delivered by Megan Mullally, a woman who knows her way around a smart remark, but White is broadly signaling what sort of night Annapurna will be: full of cutesy, whimsical jokes and implausibilities designed to win the audience over. (We also learn that Ulysses, who is a bit of a nudist, learned "the hard way," about frying in the altogether without an apron.)

Ulysses and Emma have been divorced for two decades. He was a gifted poet who apparently enjoyed a fair amount of success, but his drinking and self-destructive behavior got in the way. He has been holed up for years in this trailer, high in the Colorado mountains, more or less living off the grid. Now sober, he is dying from emphysema and lung cancer. Emma arrives with an enormous suitcase; opening it, she produces a vase with flowers and a bowl of fruit. She immediately begins tidying up the place. Even more surprisingly, she produces several thick wads of cash. And one can't help noticing the bruises on her arms. The practical reason for her visit: their son, who has mysteriously stopped speaking to Emma, is on the way, having not seen Ulysses since he was five. (The boy, Sam, used a private detective to find Ulysses, who notes, quite reasonably, that he is listed in the phone book.) The real reason for Emma's appearance: "Just because you leave someone doesn't mean you're not in a relationship with them," she says.

Over the course of 90 minutes, Annapurna moves from this determinedly wacky setup to a series of painful revelations, all of them carefully planned and thoroughly contrived. Even though Emma has dropped in from Rhode Island, she refuses Ulysses' questions, only to answer them a second later; this is an especially coy way of dragging out the exposition. (When asked what she is doing there, thousands of feet above sea level, she replies, "Passing through.") And then there is her repeated question to him: "You're saying you have no memory of the night we left?"

There's a revelation a minute in Annapurna, having to do with the fate of the hundreds of letters Ulysses has sent to Sam, Emma's falling out with her son, her disappointed marriage to a community college professor turned dry cleaning magnate ("We were the king and queen of Kleen King."), and the 150-stanza epic poem that Ulysses has been composing while enduring a subsistence existence. There are gags about Ulysses' unruly, incontinent dog; Ulysses' purchase of a hefty package of spoiled sausages; and the ants running amok in the trailer. We learn that Emma doused her husband with sleeping pills before running off with his money, a revelation that makes Ulysses look sideways at the sandwich she has just made him.

The dialogue has the unmistakable rhythm of television sitcoms. When Emma notes that Ulysses can't take care of himself, he snaps, "Why don't you hire me a nurse?" "Why don't you ask without that note of titillation?" she replies. "I mean a nurse nurse." "Really? You'd take a 400-pound Samoan force-feeding you pills?" she says. "If it was the right Samoan," he counters. Really, there's nothing wrong with Annapurna that a laugh track couldn't help.

Gradually, the conversation grows more pained, as both Ulysses and Emma admit how they have screwed up their lives. It's around this time that we learn that Ulysses' long poem is titled Annapurna, after a seeming unclimbable mountain, which is a metaphor for their marriage. And not long after, we get a major admission of dishonesty from Emma, and then it's on to Ulysses' suppressed memories of what happened That Night, leading to an ugly moment of truth and mutual catharsis.

Annapurna is, above all, a highly professional piece of work, hitting each of its emotional marks at the right moment, moving from gags to big confrontations in the smoothest possible fashion. There are solidly amusing lines: I rather liked Emma's complains about Ulysses' "I'm-going-to-be-so-careful-about this-that-I'm-not-going-to-give-any-look-at-all look." There are also some awkward lines, such as Ulysses' memory of Emma's telling him, "You loved me so much it made your tongue hurt." (What?) But mostly Annapurna seems manufactured, a tears-and-laughter vehicle designed to give two actors a workout.

Under Bart DeLorenzo's direction, Nick Offerman shines as Ulysses, capturing his dyed-in-the-wool oddness, fashioning a genuinely larger-than-life eccentric. He also has a way with a line: "What do the words 'epic poem' make you want to do?" he says, dismissing his latest work. He doesn't quite convey the character's physical frailty, but he makes a fine sparring partner. Mullally, despite her facility with a laugh line, gives a strangely muted performance at times, her vocal delivery seeming oddly flat and underpowered in a number of scenes. There are times when she appears to be struggling to find a rationale for Emma's behavior, which involves doping her husband, absconding with the money, and deceiving both Sam and Ulysses over the course of two decades.

As mentioned earlier, Walsh's trailer set, surrounded by photorealistic images of snowy mountains, is smashing. Ann Closs-Farley's costumes, Michael Gend's lighting, and John Ballinger's sound design are all perfectly good. But there's a falseness that clings to every line of Annapurna, especially when one tries to imagine how these two characters ever got together in the first place. White's script is sufficiently professional that it very well may please fans of Offerman and Mullally, who may enjoy seeing them in a different context from their television shows (and, in her case, musical theatre appearances). If you don't have that extra bit of goodwill to bring along with you, you may find it to be a bit of a climb.--David Barbour