Prevailing commercial practice dictates that stories set in exotic climes still revolve on human relationships—falling in love, coming of age, settling old scores—with their environment relegated to background decoration or propulsive coincidences. Karen Tarjen's account of Ernest Shackleton's attempt to navigate the Antarctic Circle in 1912 rejects this approach, however. In White Road, the lonely explorers may soliloquize to absent wives and mothers, but ultimately, we know nothing of the characters' personal histories beyond their relevant work skills and widely varying countries of origin.
They are an appropriately diverse lot, befitting such an expedition: Dogs are needed for land travel, and a cat is required to keep the vessel free of rats, so an animal handler is hired. An experienced captain, a carpenter versed in nautical know-how, a field physician and a multilingual quartermaster (who happens to play the banjo) are, likewise, necessary. A photographer to document the voyage is also deemed a desirable addition to the sundry personnel constituting the crew of the sailing ship Endurance.
We follow them through their preparations for the voyage and acclimation to their surroundings—notably, a DIY New Year's celebration and the rescue of the cat after an accidental plunge into the icy waters. The jolly-jack-tar adventure takes an unexpected turn, though, when the Endurance is crushed by floating ice, forcing the men to camp on a stationary floe. They subsequently take a lifeboat across open sea, hike over mountains and toboggan down frigid inclines until they arrive at a British island outpost.
This is a considerable volume of interactive landscape to replicate in a studio carved out of a Wicker Park loft, but the Irish Theater of Chicago (fka Seanachai Theater Company) accomplishes it through precisely coordinated physical expertise. Under Robert Kauzlaric's direction, the 10-member ensemble's body language conjures buffeting waves, grinding glaciers, precarious alpine ascents and every adversarial encounter documented by Shackleton's intrepid band of brothers.
Smooch Medina's scenic projections and Victoria DeIorio's score of Alfred Newman-tinged incidental music create a suitably swashbuckling ambience, while Elise Kauzlaric's dialects establish individual personalities for us to cheer.
Author Tarjen's narrative, based as it is on a single line of development—i.e., Do they survive the journey or don't they?—is not without its occasional muddy moments (the recovery missions need to be launched much more promptly, for example), but there's no denying the visceral exhilaration of a classic man-against-nature yarn. There's the humbling factor, too—whatever your rueful memories of this last winter in our city, at least you didn't have to shoot your beloved Fido.
