Man’s vs. nature, himself, other men ‘Terra Nova’ explores end of heroic age

“Terra Nova,” Ted Tally’s play about the early 20th-century race between five Englishmen and five Norwegians to reach the South Pole, eventually comes down to this: “Would you like to kill your mates or kill yourself?”

In the course of this brutal, ice-bound drama, performed by Ten Bucks Theatre through Sunday at Brewer Middle School Auditorium, the question is posed as a practical consideration by one of the Brits when the team faces insurmountable difficulties and corporeal collapse. It is offered in a more symbolic spirit by Tally, who knows that the testosterone level of adventurers and the imperatives of driven men can lead to the most shocking, even devastating, circumstances.

The practical and the symbolic come together in the primary character of Capt. Robert Falcon Scott, whose quest to be the first man to reach the South Pole by foot dovetails with his sense of himself as an aging military man whose ambition has amounted to little more than celebrity status at cocktail parties.

The very model of an Edwardian gentleman, Scott is Man Against Nature and Man Against Himself, but he is also Man Against Man, as his odyssey is overshadowed by the Norwegian rival Roald Amundsen, who outwits Scott’s archaic aspirations and beats him to the pole by using dogsleds. The Norwegian flag that greets the English team is a sign of Scott’s failure to reach his personal goal, but it’s just as much a sign of the twilight of English heroism.

With all this European manliness filling the stage, it’s odd to note that Tally’s script is still somehow fundamentally very American as a piece of theater. It was nurtured first at Yale Repertory Theater in 1977, and has had an admirable stage life in regional theaters as well as internationally. Before Tally wrote the screenplay for “Silence of the Lambs,” “Terra Nova” was his cash cow and signature work. That Ten Bucks chose to stage it is both refreshing and unsurprising. The company’s founders, after all, remain committed to producing theater that isn’t easy or complacent.

The show’s opening scenes, with projections from Scott’s actual expedition and later of English life in the early part of the 20th century, document the background of the play. Eight months after Scott and his team froze to death 11 miles from base camp in 1912, his letters and journals were discovered by a search expedition, and much of Tally’s script is adapted from those writings.

The documentary images, designed for this production by Adam Kuykendall, jump-start the show with humanizing authenticity. Because of the photos, we never can forget that these men truly existed and, with tools far less sophisticated than our own, charged into a climate far more bitter than the unforgiving bleakness of a Maine winter.

Even before that, Chez Cherry’s set design, with swaths of white material scaling the heights of the back wall and draping every inch of the performance area, recreates the frigid tundra, emphasizing the hollowness of daily sights, and reflecting an even icier emotional world of the two lead men. The lighting sometimes works against the white set, and the set sometimes fractures the imagery of the projections that occur several times throughout the performance.

But these small technical glitches, along with minor stumbles – noise from backstage, lines that get lost in the airy auditorium, overzealous makeup – are surmountable. They distract more than detract from the overall ambition and effect of the project.

“Terra Nova” is an adventure story, but its suspense comes from an inner, pensive world, one that director Julie Arnold Lisnet found fascinating as a girl studying the Scott-Amundsen story in history class and then again as an adult reading Tally’s script. Both times, her response to the tragedy was instant and intense.

Typically, Lisnet is onstage as a performer, which may explain why, as a director, she understands theatricality and isn’t afraid to charge into it, while at the same time keeping an eye on not letting it get out of hand.

The show really only bursts out of control once, during an overdone death scene by Allen Adams as Scott’s weakest link. Otherwise, Lisnet shows the value of choosing a focused and brave cast that fully understands the importance of ensemble acting to the realization of this work.

Nevertheless, it’s worth mentioning the singularity of Robert Libbey as Amundsen, who is both the competitor and the angel of death for Scott. Amundsen haunts the action even when he is offstage. Libbey performs the role with nearly snarling swagger and arrogance, nailing the sinister and brutish side of the character without making him completely unlikable – a crafty bit of stage work.

Tally doesn’t dramatically grant Libbey a team to tell his story, a group to toast his achievement, a wife to fuel his hallucinations and flashbacks, which are the techniques the playwright uses to deepen Scott’s story in an otherwise linear plot. Like Amundsen, Libbey proves that it doesn’t take chivalry to win a ferocious game; it takes a thirst that spits in the face of mediocrity.

Still, the power of this story is meant to come from Ron Adams’ Scott, whose frailty and passion fight for center stage whether instructing trusty companions or dreamily reminiscing with Kathleen, his Shavian-wannabe artist wife, a thinly drawn role given intelligence and grace by the statuesque Lily Christian.

Adams, one of Bangor’s finest performers, finds Scott’s weaknesses without ever quite allowing him to be a sympathetic personality. It may be that Adams hasn’t quite found the substantial center of this role; or it may be that Tally has spent too much time straining to be insightful about a man whose inner world is not compellingly heroic.

Adams’ scenes with his team – especially the able-bodied, always lionhearted, sometimes grave and often sweet George Bragdon, Dominick Varney, Christopher Franklin – portray camaraderie among men as tender and tenacious. Together they create the ambiance of the fire that ignites their souls and the raw temperatures that vanquish their expedition. They must convince us of a frozen world. They must convince us of danger and paranoia and pain. In their accomplishment, they turn out to represent quiet stars in this production.

Adams’ scenes with Libbey are like a battle of the baritones, and their voices carry as if they were the only two men in the world’s frozen arena, intellectual gladiators who honor the other’s skill but are out for blood. They love and hate each other, need and reject each other, and the two actors find that chilling symbiosis.

“Terra Nova” is a deliberately slow play. It makes no small requirement of the audience to go along with the discovery of one man’s hopes, sacrifices and personal turmoil. Most of all, Tally asks us to consider whether the real failure of Scott’s life was at Antarctica or deep within himself.

Ten Bucks Theatre will perform “Terra Nova” at 8 p.m. Oct. 24 and 25, and 2 p.m. Oct. 26 at Brewer Middle School Auditorium, 5 Somerset St. in Brewer. For information, call 884-1030.