Salt Lake City, UT—Sharr White’s Annapurna has often been described as a play about forgiveness, but this iteration by Lil Poppet Productions reveals something more unsettling beneath that description. Directed by Matthew Ivan Bennett, this intimate staging understands that forgiveness in Annapurna is never clean, cathartic, or complete. Instead, the play becomes an excavation of emotional debris: two people circling the ruins of a shared life while trying to determine whether understanding is still possible before death arrives.
Set almost entirely inside a battered trailer in rural Colorado, Annapurna follows Emma and Ulysses, former spouses who have not seen each other in twenty years. Emma abruptly left in the middle of the night decades earlier, taking their young son with her and severing contact. Now, after learning that Ulysses is dying from emphysema and lung cancer, she returns. What follows is less a reunion than a slow emotional ascent through memory, resentment, humor, shame, and unresolved grief.
The production’s confined setting intensifies that sensation of emotional thin air. The trailer becomes its own mountain face: isolated, unstable, difficult to escape. Set design by Bennett and Stephanie Stroud transforms the space into an archive of emotional collapse, where every object feels suspended between abandonment and survival. The cluttered environment reflects the emotional accumulation of twenty years spent avoiding the same unresolved trauma.
The title Annapurna initially appears disconnected from the play itself. No one climbs the Himalayan mountain, and the action remains confined to a deteriorating trailer in rural Colorado. Yet the mountain becomes the play’s governing metaphor, shaping nearly every aspect of its emotional architecture. Annapurna, one of the deadliest mountains in the world, represents not triumph but survival under extreme conditions—where altitude strips the body of oxygen and climbers are forced to confront their own physical and psychological limits. Sharr White uses that imagery to frame Emma and Ulysses’ confrontation as its own perilous ascent through grief, memory, resentment, and love.
Throughout the play, White repeatedly invokes mountains, elevation, and oxygen deprivation. Ulysses watches climbers attempt nearby peaks from the trailer window, often describing how they become “stuck and scared” before requiring rescue. The metaphor becomes especially resonant through his failing lungs. Dependent upon oxygen tanks to survive, Ulysses exists in a state of literal breathlessness that mirrors the emotional suffocation both characters experience. In Annapurna, breathing itself becomes symbolic: survival requires labor, endurance, and assistance from others.
This understands this metaphor not as decorative symbolism but as the emotional core of the play. Directed by Matthew Ivan Bennett, the production emphasizes the claustrophobic emotional altitude at which Emma and Ulysses operate. Their conversations rarely move directly forward; instead, they circle around painful truths the way climbers navigate dangerous terrain. Humor functions like temporary oxygen relief—brief moments allowing both characters and audience to survive the pressure before descending once more into confrontation and grief.
At the center of the metaphor lies the question of whether emotional survival is possible after irreversible damage. Emma and Ulysses are not climbing toward reconciliation in any sentimental sense. Instead, they are attempting something far more difficult: to remain emotionally present long enough to speak honestly to one another before death intervenes. Like mountaineers enduring dangerous altitude, both characters risk collapse simply by continuing the ascent.
What makes Annapurna so affecting is that the play never promises a clean summit. There is no total absolution waiting at the top of the mountain. Instead, White suggests that survival itself may be the only achievable victory—the difficult act of continuing to breathe in conditions where the air has grown dangerously thin.
White’s script remains remarkably effective because it resists melodrama even while dealing with enormous emotional stakes. The play contains revelations that, in lesser hands, could collapse into sentimentality or theatrical manipulation. Instead, Bennett’s direction trusts the silences between the lines as much as the dialogue itself. The pacing allows tension to accumulate gradually, creating a production that feels emotionally claustrophobic without ever becoming stagnant.
At the center of the production are two deeply committed performances from Stephanie Stroud as Emma and Jeff Nichols as Ulysses. Stroud’s Emma is tightly controlled but visibly exhausted by the effort of maintaining that control. She enters the trailer carrying years of anger and emotional self-preservation, yet Stroud carefully avoids reducing the character to bitterness alone. Instead, her performance reveals someone attempting to navigate the impossible contradiction of caring for a man who profoundly wounded her while refusing to erase the damage he caused.
Nichols gives Ulysses an abrasive charisma that gradually gives way to startling vulnerability. The character’s humor—often crude, defensive, or self-deprecating—becomes a mechanism for survival rather than comic relief alone. Nichols captures the contradictions embedded within the role: Ulysses is frustrating, selfish, intelligent, frightened, and painfully human all at once. Importantly, he never sentimentalizes the character’s decline. The performance allows the audience to recognize the harm Ulysses caused without flattening him into villainy.
What ultimately elevates both performances is their chemistry together. Stroud and Nichols create the sense of two people who know each other too well—people capable of predicting one another’s rhythms, defenses, and wounds before words are even spoken. Their arguments never feel performative; they feel lived-in, shaped by years of repetition and emotional history. At times, the play’s sharp humor lands almost accidentally, emerging from the exhausted familiarity between them rather than from punchlines alone.
The production’s design elements reinforce that emotional landscape with impressive precision. The set design by Bennett and Stroud creates a trailer that feels genuinely inhabited rather than theatrically distressed. The cluttered environment becomes a physical manifestation of emotional stagnation: a life suspended in unresolved memory. Lighting designer Gavin Versteeg subtly shapes the production’s emotional rhythm through muted tones and carefully controlled shadows, while the collaborative sound design deepens the sense of isolation surrounding the trailer.
Particularly effective is the production’s attention to bodily deterioration. Earlier productions of Annapurna have sometimes struggled to make Ulysses’ illness feel physically convincing, but the FX make-up work by Gail Wright helps ground the character’s decline in visible reality. Ulysses’ failing body becomes impossible to ignore, intensifying the urgency beneath every conversation.
The influence of Morag Shepherd, credited with auxiliary direction, can also be felt in the production’s tonal balance. Like Shepherd’s own work, this Annapurna understands how trauma reshapes language and pacing. Conversations rarely move cleanly forward; instead, characters circle around painful truths indirectly, through humor, deflection, accusation, and silence.
What Lil Poppet Productions achieves here is not merely an effective staging of White’s play, but an unusually intimate theatrical experience. Bennett’s production recognizes that Annapurna is ultimately about the terrifying vulnerability required to speak honestly to another person after years of silence. The result is a production that is often funny, frequently uncomfortable, and quietly devastating long after the final scene fades to black.
About the Show: Annapurna
Lil Poppet Productions presents Annapurna by Sharr White, directed by Matthew Ivan Bennett.
Set in a deteriorating trailer in the Colorado Rockies, Annapurna follows Emma and Ulysses, a divorced couple who have not seen each other in twenty years. After learning that Ulysses is terminally ill, Emma unexpectedly returns, forcing both of them to confront the unresolved pain, love, resentment, and mystery that fractured their family decades earlier. Over the course of a single uninterrupted ninety-minute encounter, the play navigates memory, addiction, mortality, and the difficult possibility of forgiveness.
Though often darkly funny, Annapurna is ultimately an intimate and emotionally charged drama about survival—both physical and emotional. White’s script balances sharp humor with moments of devastating honesty, exploring how people continue carrying one another long after relationships collapse.
This production stars Jeff Nichols as Ulysses and Stephanie Stroud as Emma. The creative team includes lighting design by Gavin Versteeg, set design by Stroud and Bennett, FX make-up by Gail Wright, and auxiliary direction by Morag Shepherd.
Known for producing intimate, actor-driven work, Lil Poppet Productions brings a raw immediacy to White’s play, emphasizing the claustrophobic emotional terrain between two people attempting to reckon with the wreckage of a shared past before time runs out.
Ticket Information
Annapurna is presented by Lil Poppet Productions as a pay-what-you-can production, helping make independent theatre more accessible to the community.
Tickets can be reserved here: https://events.humanitix.com/annapurna
Annapurna
By Sharr White
Directed by Matthew Ivan Bennett
Cast
- Jeff Nichols as Ulysses
- Stephanie Stroud as Emma
Cast
- Jeff Nichols — Ulysses
- Stephanie Stroud — Emma
Production Team
- Stage Manager — Amelia Stensrud
- Assistant Stage Manager — Gail Wright
- Front of House — Tay Rushton
- Lighting Design — Gavin Versteeg
- Set Design — Stephanie Stroud and Matthew Ivan Bennett
- Sound Design — Company
- FX Make-Up — Gail Wright
- Marketing — Valentine PR
- Photography — Doug Carter
- Directing Observership — Charlotte Gordon
- Auxiliary Direction — Morag Shepherd
Westminster Contribution
- Patron Outreach — Madison Archibald
- Facilities Manager — Summer Spence
Leave a Reply