Sharr White's riveting two-person play, Annapurna. pits burned-out poet Ulysses (Nick Offerman) against his ex-wife, Emma (Megan Mullally), who has unexpectedly shown up after having walked out on him twenty years ago (for reasons that aren't revealed until the climactic moments of the play). There is a third character in Annapurna: murder.
Both Ulysses and Emma are seething with long-bottled up feelings of anger and resentment, feelings that could easily explode into violence. Much of the play’s suspense derives from the possibility that these two wounded, smouldering creatures could do each other serious harm. But there are other sides to Ulysses and Emma: they are also fiendishly smart, funny and capable of moments of understanding and empathy. That makes for the play's essential conflict, a battle between love and death.
Annapurna’s setting, Ulysses' trash-filled mountain trailer, is real enough to almost become another character. You can almost smell the detritus of his failed existence, the stench of the cheap sausages he cooks for himself (and his unseen, yapping hound). When Emma tries to clean the place up, she is really trying to clean up Ulysses' life (though she can't do a damn thing about the emphysema that obliges him to wear an oxygen bottle on his back).
It takes skilled acting to try and capture the many sides of these two complex characters and make them fully dimensional human beings rather than grotesque caricatures. Fortunately, Mullally (of “Will & Grace” TV fame) and Offerman (of “Parks and Recreation” fame), are not just TV stars but accomplished stage actors. That they are also married to each other gives them a special psychic bond, a chemistry that's hard to beat. It also helps that they are working with a director, Bart DeLorenzo, who is a former colleague at the L.A. theater company, Evidence Room.
