Annapurna
Opening Night: April 13, 2014
Closing: June 1, 2014
Theater: Acorn Theatre
Annapurna tells the story of Emma, who walked out on her husband, cowboy-poet Ulysses in the middle of the night. Now hearing he’s in dire straits, she tracks him down in the wilds of Colorado in a grungy trailer, working on his magnum opus, hooked up to an oxygen tank and cooking in the buff. Their reunion, charged by rage and compassion, brings back the best and worst of their former bond.
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April 21, 2014
A big messy trailer sits on the stage of the Acorn Theatre. Little black ants crawl through a jungle gym of Hungry Man frozen-dinner packages. Wooden shelves sag under the weight of stacks of books. Through the filthy, frostbitten windows of this shabby abode, you can see a spectacular view of the snowcapped Rocky Mountains. This is the home of a poet named Ulysses, and the set for Sharr White’s Annapurna, now receiving its New York premiere in a production by The New Group. Much like its setting, there’s something breathtakingly beautiful behind this play, but to see it you have to get through a lot of muck. This two-hander stars real-life husband and wife Nick Offerman (Parks and Recreation) and Megan Mullally (Will & Grace). Ulysses (Offerman) is a cowboy-poet living in self-imposed exile in Paonia, Colorado. Emma (Mullally) is his ex-wife, now on the run from her second marriage. Their son, Sam, hasn’t seen his father since he was five years old, when Emma took him and ran. While Sam sees his dad as a hero, Emma can’t help but remember Ulysses as an abusive drunk. When Emma shows up at Ulysses’ trailer two decades later, he wonders why. Considering the foul state of things in the trailer, we all wonder why.
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April 22, 2014
Some of the many ways people can destroy their own happiness are on full, tragic display in Sharr White’s imaginative play Annapurna. Real-life husband and wife Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally play a divorced couple with a big mystery in their past, in an intimate, convincingly natural production, directed by Bart DeLorenzo, that opened Monday night off-Broadway at The New Group. In a comically shocking introduction to Offerman’s character, Ulysses, his estranged, urbane ex-wife Emma bursts into his squalid trailer to find him clad only in a loincloth-like apron and an oxygen backpack. From this overly quirky reunion, White, (The Other Place), builds the rest of his story with care. DeLorenzo’s sure touch lets the focus linger on more somber moments while capturing the humor and irony of others.
READ THE REVIEWApril 21, 2014
Real-life couple Nick Offerman (Parks and Recreation) and Megan Mullally (name a sitcom and she’s done an arc) go for anything but laughs in Annapurna, a two-person drama about love, loss, and not remembering why you lost that love. (The New Group production runs through June 1 at Off Broadway’s Acorn Theatre.) Offerman plays Ulysses, a former celebrated poet and professor, now withering away in a bug-infested trailer in ”the ass crack of the Rockies.” He’s perfectly pathetic, shuffling around in nothing but a filthy apron and a backpack with an oxygen tank that pumps air through a nose tube to his failing lungs, and frying up rancid sausage for his relentless barker of a dog. That is until his ex-wife, Emma (Mullally), barrels in with all kinds of luggage, emotional and literal.
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April 21, 2014
Real-life spouses and sitcom royals Megan Mullally (Will & Grace) and Nick Offerman (Parks and Recreation) play a long-estranged couple who reunite after 20 years in a two-hander by the suddenly everywhere Sharr White (The Snow Geese). Bart DeLorenzo directs the NYC premiere for the New Group. Nick Offerman wears only a filthy apron and an oxygen tank in a backpack when Sharr White’s Annapurna begins. But that physical exposure is nothing compared to the emotional one awaiting his character, Ulysses, a poet and ex-professor who smoked himself to emphysema and lung cancer after overcoming a drinking problem. Still, it’s a darkly funny sight that sums up the tone White tries to evoke throughout this two-hander, a salty blend of Sam Shepard and sitcom that doesn’t coalesce.
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April 21, 2014
Plays with just two characters usually move in one of two directions: from animosity to comity, or vice versa. Annapurna, a new play by Sharr White starring Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman, is definitely the kind that begins in full battle. As the play opens, Ms. Mullally’s Emma barges into the grungy trailer where her ex-husband, Mr. Offerman’s Ulysses, has long been living off the grid, or rather above it, in a speck of a town high in the mountains of Colorado. Ulysses’ grunting, grudging welcome suggests that he’d rather receive a drop-in visit from a black bear. Such a creature would not object to the squalor in which Ulysses has been happily living, as Emma vociferously does. And from the size of the luggage she hauls into Ulysses’ trailer, it seems pretty clear that Emma hasn’t come by just to do a quick check-in. She seems to have brought more possessions with her than Ulysses even owns, and soon sets about stuffing piles of garbage into bags and wielding a bottle of Formula 409 as if it were an Uzi.
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