Theatre Review: A doomed trek to the South Pole finds it way to local stage

PHOTOS COURTESY DEBORAH BURKE

By DAVID POGUE

In the winter of 1911, explorer Robert Scott led a five-man expedition to the geographical South Pole on foot, hoping to plant the British flag. But when they arrived, they found a Norwegian flag already flying. A team led by Roald Amundsen had beaten them by months.

It was downhill from there; all five Englishmen died on their return journey. We know of their story from Scott’s journals — and from a play, produced through March 9 by the Town Players of New Canaan, Conn. 

The play is billed, weirdly, as “Terra Nova by Ted Tally by Ted Tally.” In case you  missed it, the playwright is Ted Tally. (He’d go on to win an Oscar for his “Silence of the Lambs” screenplay, 14 years after “Terra Nova.”)

Town Players is a community theater group, all volunteers, but you wouldn’t know it from the trappings of this production. We get realistic, period-looking medical and cooking gear, authentic costumes (sweaters and canvas jackets — down parkas weren’t yet a thing in 1911), and an astonishing replica of the thousand-pound sled that these poor souls dragged across the ice. There are video projections, continuous whistling wind sounds, and a fog machine, and some surprisingly accomplished transition music composed by Massachusetts 11-year-old Dylan Conuel. If all of this doesn’t transport you to Antarctica, book a cruise.

Since we already know the grim outcome of Scott’s expedition — it’s written right on the program’s cover — there’s not much suspense. The show is not exactly a “laff riot,” either. 

What distinguishes the storytelling, though, are flashbacks and hallucinations, which become increasingly plausible (and moving) as the men’s conditions deteriorate. 

Capt. Scott himself, of course, is our main character. A bearded Matthew Bogen (in his other life, an IT director at Yale) offers a haunted, steely-jawed interpretation of a haunted, steely-jawed character. It’s not his fault that Scott, as written by Tally, suffers from PCS. That would be “protagonist cipher syndrome,” in which you strive so hard to write a likeable and universal main character that he winds up with no personality at all. 

PCS is a common pitfall of inexperienced writers — Tally was 24 when he wrote this show — but it hits this play especially hard. Just ask veteran TV actor Amber Skye Noyes, who plays Scott’s wife, Kathleen. Her talent would transfer effortlessly to Broadway, and she’s the only cast member who manages a flawless British accent. But her part is a two-dimensional trope: the beautiful, long-suffering wife of a manly hero.

“You’d always measure me against what might have been. I’d always come out wanting,” she tells Scott in flashback, when he has doubts about the expedition. “You’re the best man for the job, anyone can see that!”

She’s so sidelined that, in the entire play, she never strays more than 6 feet from the edge of the stage.

The secondary characters are far more interesting. Chief among them is Amundsen himself — the Norwegian baddie — who appears solely in Scott’s imagination. Matt Regney, who in real life is a union stagehand, crushes it. He bears a head-to-toe fur coat, a bushy beard, and a Russian accent (?), and he’s delicious as Scott’s foil, his Greek chorus, troll, and tormentor.

“I won’t apologize for common sense,” he tells Scott, explaining his plan to eat his own sled dogs. “A husky is 50 pounds of dinner, hauling you along until you need to eat it.” The play seems to suggest that Scott’s expedition failed because he refused to follow suit. (Left unsaid: That in real life, Scott ate his horses.)

Scott’s men, played by Billy Anderson, Daniel Basiletti, Chris Cluett and Dan Murphy, are uniformly great and rich in their characterizations. But Murphy delivers the show’s most memorable and harrowing scenes.

He plays the slightly dim, fully doomed “Taffy” Evans. For days, he’s been concealing a hand injury from the others; he fears slowing them down. Now, however, the wound is turning black and gangrenous, and soon Evans is precisely the burden he dreaded becoming. His final scene is the show’s pinnacle of drama, emotion, and horror: his skin burning with frostbite, his mind turned to mush, he flings off his coat, exposing himself to the bitter cold. The entire audience stopped breathing. 

I swear to you, I saw this actor shivering. (Isn’t that an involuntary thing?)

So yes, the 49-year-old “Terra Nova” is on the creaky side, with a generous dollop of melodrama. You know: “The things I’ve seen there! Terrible and wonderful! Colors falling from the sky! Silence, like a scream into wind!” 

Well, OK.

Still, this performance works. Director/sound designer/set designer Deborah Burke has corralled so much stagecraft, and directed her cast with so much humanity, that something amazing happens over these two and a half hours. Your body may be sitting in a little eight-row theater, 1 mile inside a New Canaan park. But your brain, now in another time and place, is fully invested in the tragedy unspooling before you. You’re relieved, for a couple of hours, from the doomscrolling of your own problems. 

The Greeks called it catharsis, and it’s good stuff.