BWW Reviews: TERRA NOVA an Elegant Doom at The Vortex

The Vortex Theater was painted white up to the audience's feet, walls painted with spare white mountains. The wind was blowing on this bleak and forbidding Antarctic tundra-yet as the lights rose, an anachronism stepped forward: A man in a tuxedo, not a parka, introducing Robert Falcon Scott. Scott, played by Brennan Foster, wearing full arctic gear, was within his tent as he died of exposure. Yet he acquiesced to the tuxedoed man, and stepped through time and space to solicit Britain's National Geographic Society to support the mission which will be his demise. From these first few minutes, the audience could feel the true setting for this play, Ted Tally's Terra Nova: Not the tundra, nor Britain, but the interstitial standpoint of the soul.

Whose soul? Ostensibly, Scott's: The sparse white expanse is a backdrop upon which Tally cast the kaleidoscope of Scott's psyche. Optimizing this script, directors Mark Hisler and Aaron Worley designed scenes of constant action and multiple dimension-stage right, men pulled a sled; as downstage center, Scott's in conversation with his wife Kathleen; as upstage, behind an transparent scrim, Scott's rival Amundsen approached to haunt him (when Admunsen came forward, the lighting changed to red, and an unsettling drone bore down upon the space). These staging and technical elements, consistent and elegant, created a poetry of action that channeled a brooding pace throughout numerous transitions of place and time. The effect was engrossing-intermission caught me by surprise.

But I found ways to criticize in the second act-interestingly enough in the same area where I'd found praise: As the stage direction in the first act punctuated the poetry of honor "for king and country," the same direction seemed to contrived the anti-poetry-death, where nature has conquered king and country, sanity and strength.

I lay this criticism lightly, however. At the edge of the world, circumstances are so forbidding that even the slightest artifice will appear glaringly obvious. Moreover, this very issue-the tension between society's fine manners and survival's brutal needs-was the theme of the play. Myself, I would've directed/acted the despair as an unravelling, and exposed more marrow. But this show did differently-to what effect?

Instead of surrendering his nerve, Foster insulated his marrow as long as possible-a tall, strong man, he resembled a bear resigning to final hibernation more than he does a fox with his foot in a trap. The ensemble corroborated this choice: The cheer and cooperation in Scott's four-man team never broke-only faded (credit to the actors that no two men faded the same way), as each man faced mortality alone. And representing home and England, Kathleen's (played by Jen Stephenson) poise-which in the first act read as support-gradually became statuesque, cadenced-as his relevance in her world, and her relevance in his memory, receded. Only Malcolm June as Admundsen gave the edge I would have chosen, and with great effect; with gruff stylization almost like a comic book villain (yet never gaudy), he embodied the harsh pragmatism that is Scott's antithesis.

I can't say I ever warmed-up to all these choices, but warmth wasn't the point of this play. I'll leave it to my reader to see the show and feel the effect of these choices for themselves-yet I'd like to share my own experience, which lingers in my chest like a shard of ice: To share a space with all the classic literary conflicts-man versus society, nature, and self-as they bore down and crush a man, was to share a space with what cannot be crushed, the soul of the fool which slips between the consequence of folly and shares its truth with all.

Tickets: The Vortex Theater

Last weekend!

March 15-April 17, 2016. Fri-Sat 7:30pm; Sun 2pm. Tickets $22.

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