A 1977
play by
Ted Tally. It's about the famous race for the
South Pole by a
British team, led by Captain
Robert Falcon Scott, and a
Norwegian team, led by
Roald Amundsen. The play focuses on the Brits, who lost the race by a month and ended up dying in the snows on the way back to the
Antarctic coast. Scott's
journals were found with his body and detailed much of the team's
journey and
tragic end.
The play is an
odd,
hallucinatory thing. While it is indeed set in
Antarctica and everyone dresses appropriately, there are numerous
flashbacks to Scott's wife, Kathleen, who visits and sometimes
interacts with the team wearing clothes suitable for an English
summer. Amundsen himself appears frequently, serving as a combination of
nemesis and
Greek chorus. In fact, the
second act begins with the British team dining together in
England and
toasting the success of their
expedition -- an event which, obviously, never occurred.
I've only seen "Terra Nova" once, when I was in
college, and it's still my
favorite ever. There was almost no
publicity done for this play (a
criminal act, considering the weeks of
advertising done for the far inferior production of "
Chicago" later that year), but the theater was still packed. The set was
stark and almost
empty: two
white wooden
arches on either side of the
stage (I've heard of other
productions where most of the stage was draped in
white sheets). The
actor playing Captain Scott wasn't even a
drama major, but he got the
haggard,
haunted look perfect. The actor
portraying Amundsen was quite
amazing, switching from
sympathetic observer to
dastardly supervillain from one scene to the next. There were also some very
interesting things done with some of the props, the supply
sled in particular; I've never forgotten the scene where Amundsen seemingly transforms a
dining table into the sled just by whipping the
tablecloth off.
And the best
special effect of all: the
theater was well-heated, but the audience
shivered.