Gregory Wagrowski and Jacqueline Reid

This rather startling scene introduces the audience to the Fusion production of Annapurna, currently running at the Cell Theater in downtown Albuquerque. I saw this play on a Saturday afternoon, normally a slow time in local theaters, but it was almost sold out—and justifiably so. For its focal character, the poet Ulysses, is brought to life by Gregory Wagrowski in the strongest stage performance I have ever seen in Albuquerque.

It is not an easy role. It is not only Wagrowski's strutting, striding, and wobbling body that is half clothed, half naked; so are his emotions. This is a strong man reduced to weakness, a famous man shrunken into a recluse, a brilliant writer whose voice has been silenced, a proud man slathered in shame, a vital man waiting only for death. Wagrowski pulls it off. We sense from the beginning the mixture of humor and despondency, anger and hopelessness with which he somehow manages to continue facing the remnant of his life.

What occasions his "Oh crap!" exclamation, and what sets the action in motion and propels it for the next 90 minutes, is the arrival of the poet's ex-wife Emma. Jacqueline Reid, a founder of the Fusion and a principal in most of its productions, makes the ex-wife into a fitting foil for Wagrowski's outrageousness. She is neat, a bit prissy, shy (she keeps urging him to get dressed), hesitant but also flirtatious, touching (both figuratively and literally), profoundly sad beneath a bland exterior, simultaneously passive and presumptuous, and, ultimately, loving.

The pair put on a performance not easily forgotten. Helping them along the way is a set that immediately conjures up every miserable, rundown, unkempt trailer you've ever seen. The stove is next to the shower and the toilet. Five pounds of rotten sausage stink the place up every time the refrigerator is opened. Filthy clothes are strewn across the chairs, and dirt covers the floor—"dirt is the only thing holding this place together," Ulysses confesses. The screen door is broken and the windows are covered with newspapers. "The dog ate the phone," whose cord dangles uselessly. This is how Ulysses has lived for years, on his $12 monthly check from his publisher, isolated in Paonia, Colorado. Paonia is a real life village in the Rocky Mountains mainly known for sweet apples and the excellent environmental magazine High Country News. I've visited Paonia and I have to say its rural farming prosperity, neat ranch-style homes and pretty orchards and meadows do not resemble the Paonia of this play—a "purgatory... the ugliest, saddest accidental nudist colony you ever saw." I never even encountered a nudist there.

Ulysses and Emma have been divorced for 20 years, ever since a mysterious misadventure led her to grab her 5-year-old son and leave her husband without notice or explanation. The nature of this misadventure is held in suspense until the play's final moments, but it led to the collapse of Ulysses's life and his move to the mountains. Now, in the wake of her own divorce from her second husband (also a poet and a teacher, but a pallid shadow of Ulysses), Emma drives to Paonia, unloads two heavy suitcases, pulls out a $17,000 pile of cash and announces she is moving in "until ... ." The unstated words are "your death," which seems imminent due to his emphysema and lung cancer.

He doesn't exactly welcome her. "Get out!" he soon shouts. Later, he adds reluctantly, "Up here in the clouds I've come to a kind of peace." When Ulysses tells Emma, "I'm dead serious," she can only respond, "I never know if you're serious." It is inevitable, however, that he admits midway in the play, "It's good to see you." For a man of such intensely suppressed passion, these five words carry the weight of an epic poem.

There is, in fact, a real epic poem, part of which is read toward the end of the play, and when it is, we realize that words Ulysses cannot utter as a man, a husband and a father, he can communicate movingly in writing.

The title of the play refers to one of the highest mountains in the Himalayas, and one of the deadliest. Ulysses describes how a party of climbers was overcome by tragedy and how one climber on the way down dropped his gloves and suffered severe frostbite. (After the play was written, the mountain took on even more tragic significance last fall when an unseasonable blizzard hit in the midst of the trekking season; 28 tourists were killed and 220 had to be rescued, many by helicopter.) Ulysses also describes looking up at the mountains overhanging Paonia and watching naive climbers start to climb only to be stymied by unexpected difficulties and struggling to survive. Sustaining a relationship, confronting the past, and reviving a lost love make climbing a mountain look like a stroll in the park.

Playwright Sharr White, whose prose delicately tiptoes along the boundary between satire and tragedy, also wrote The Other Place, a highly successful and almost equally powerful play that the Fusion performed last year. Director Laurie Thomas has done her usually skilled job of steering her two experienced actors, and production stage manager Maria Lee Schmidt and her crew have outdone themselves with an evocative set.

The play continues through February 20, 2015, at the Cell, 701 First St. NW in downtown Albuquerque, with February 17-20 being pay-what-you-wish days (sponsored by the city of Albuquerque), followed by a February 21 performance at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe. For information and tickets go to fusionnm.org or call 766-9412.

Photo: Harrison Sim

--Wally Gordon