White Hell

By T.E.K.

K2 by Patrick Meyers

Modern man's awe of nature has pretty much atrophied. Primitive man stood in still wonder in the presence of the seamless order of the elements and took violent fissures of that order as omens of supernatural wrath. Today such disasters are rationalized as freakish accidents, not as shattering revelations of immutable forces that man may never tame.

"I will show you fear in a handful of dust," wrote T.S. Eliot. The towering set that vaults above and plummets below the stage of Broadway's Brooks Atkinson Theater shows us fear on the inscrutable face of a perpendicular wall of stone and ice, pockmarked by eons. The hand-held camera that scales Designer Ming Cho Lee's awesome set is the playgoer's eye, restored to a 20/20 vision of the power, mystery, majesty and menace of undomesticated nature.

Halfway up this grim parapet of fate is a scooped-out ledge, a pocket of tenuous survival, where two men lie panting for breath. Taylor (Jeffrey DeMunn) and Harold (Jay Patterson) have reached the summit of K2. At 28,250 ft., this Himalayan peak is the second highest mountain in the world, topped only by Everest. On the way down, Harold lost his footing and suffered a critical leg wound. Only Taylor can descend for help. He is short 120 ft. of much needed rope, having left it at the last stopping place. He climbs the sheer wall three times to secure it. It is a feat of hair-raising tension that earns DeMunn spontaneous applause for his endeavors. But nature is not mocked or appeased. The rope hurtles by the pair in a brutal snowslide that nearly buries them.

"Mountains are metaphors," Harold says, but imminent death is not. The two men jest, curse and trade raw-tongued obscenities--all impotent delaying actions. Playwright Meyers tries to penetrate the core of each man's being, but he is only fitfully successful. Information is not insight. Meyers probes the past lives of Taylor and Harold, but not their hearts and souls or the roots of their perplexing friendship. Taylor is a hard-nosed district attorney with a rightist bias who revels in his animal prowess with girls in singles bars. Harold is a do-good veteran of the '60s scene with its liberal pantomimes and drug dabbling. He sought God in a physics equation and found solace in a loving wife and child. His poetic affirmation of that love affectingly shields him from the play's ungentle night.

If the text is sometimes like shifting snow, DeMunn's and Patterson's acting skills are rock-solid. Credit Playwright Meyers with braving a skyhold on verities more elevated than Broadway's passing parade of frivolity.

--T.E.K. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.