Intrepid Soul

By T.E.K.

TERRA NOVA by Ted Tally

Out of the night that covers me Black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever Gods may be For my unconquerable soul.

-- William Ernest Henley

Those lines were written in 1888, when the future Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott was 20 years old. They seem like an appropriate epigraph for this play by Ted Tally, 25, which explores the heart of courage in a white hell of adversity.

Expertly mounted at New Haven's Yale Repertory Theater, Terra Nova offers us another fresh dramatic talent.

Terra Nova was the name of the ship in which Scott and a tiny band of intrepid men sailed for the Antarctic in June 1910 with the hope of being the first to stand on the South Pole.

Playwright Tally's approach is chronological and documentary, but he never gets icebound by his research. A back cloth of ghostly white covers the entire rear wall, and the floor has a bleak, blinding pallor. The sled carrying supplies and scientific instruments is a gray oblong mass to be pushed and pulled by the men like a cursed rock of Sisyphus.

Scott (Arthur Hill) will not permit the use of Huskies (though his Norwegian rival Roald Amundsen, played by Michael Higgins, does) on the ground that it is unsporting. Offstage, the blizzards howl like the piercing moans of the damned.

Under the bitterest torments of nature, Scott and his companions reach the South Pole, only to find the Norwegian flag mocking them. On the horrible trek back, the men die one by one, with only the cruel snow to mourn and bury them.

Yet Tally is not showing us the face of tragedy but drawing a profile of the ambiguous nature of the hero. Was Scott mad for glory? Despite an ardent and adoring bride (Lindsay Grouse), could he feel the fullness of life only on the hairpin curve of total danger? One is bound to feel that Tally wants us to see the hero as a visionary. The reason his men follow him is that his leadership is a magnetic pole, more real to them than the actual pole.

Scott is why they are there, and Jeremy Geidt, Michael Gross, Max Wright and Stephen Rowe convey that with rare skill and sensitivity. Unfortunately, Hill, while decent as a saint, lacks the lightning that fires blind fealty in other men.

For a generation, the educated young of the U.S. have been taught to deride or satirize the heroic. It is moving to watch their rapt attention at Terra Nova, for they are famished for models of honor. -- T.E.K.

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