Annapurna Playwright Sharr White Says Unconditional Love Has Destructive Power

Sharr White

​Playwright Sharr White (The Other Place, Sunlight, Six Years) lives in New York state with his wife and two sons and works full time as an advertising copywriter. His latest play, Annapurna, is the story of a poet named Ulysses who's dying in a trailer park and his ex-wife, Emma, who comes back to him after walking out 20 years before. Annapurna, directed by Loretta Greco, had its world premiere last week at the Magic Theatre and runs through Dec. 4.

White talked to us about playing with language, mining the newspaper for contemporary stories, and the destruction in epic relationships.

What's it like getting ready for the play in San Francisco when you live across the country, working full time?
I'm trying to hold down my 9-to-5, and luckily, I work at the kind of company where although I'm never really off call, I can work remotely. I just have to be diligent. It's hard rehearsing on California time because I'll get up really early and do work stuff and then go rehearse and then come back and do work stuff, but you know, I've got to put food on my family (laughs). I've been a copywriter for different fashion brands for 11 years, and copywriting is just sort of word games and games with syntax and stuff, so it's kind of great because I get to free associate with language all day (laughs). It's helped me with precision and, I think, learning how to pull out phrases and make them sharper and make them pop and learn the technicalities behind doing that. It's been good for me because I'm sort of a nerd at heart about that (laughs).

You say you obsessively read the newspaper. Why do you like finding stories there?
It's really the best place to find stories -- obits, a lot of profiles -- I think the good papers have such rich illuminations of people, set against the backdrop of their time. For me a good play marries characters with a theme and with an idea. I go through the paper because I want to be tuned into what's happening now, and I read a lot of history to see what's happening then and how there are correlations. I really want to find the theme of the time, of now and write about now in a way that feels important to us. I just want to know who we are now, and I think the paper has everything to do with that.

Did Annapurna come out of something you read in the paper?
Well, it's partly inspired by a friend of mine who had moved to Key West with her husband who was terminally ill with emphysema. Annapurna is a total fiction, but there was something about their relationship, and they've been together for years and years, and they were always skating around the issue of the husband's mortality. So that was the spark of it, and I really wanted to write something not about them, but to them.

Then I read this thing in the Times about seven or eight years ago about how former couples often get back together or come together when one of them becomes terminal. It was about people who come back to care for their former partners, and it was really beautiful and touching. So I was sort of combining those two ideas. I thought there's something so amazing about these two people who know each other better than anything else in the world, there's an ingrained intimacy, and yet they drive each other crazy. It's about trying to get in everything you need to get in before the end. There's something touching about the idea.

Loretto Greco, artistic director of the Magic and the director of this play, said it was about unconditional love and its destructive force. That struck me because I think we usually think of unconditional love as being the ideal. Do you think it's about the destructive force of unconditional love?
I really think it is. We've all had our epic relationships, and I think the push and pull of these important relationships is because there is some destruction in them, which makes them epic. Sometimes in the most intimate relationships, the most intimate moment is the moment of leaving. Finally, you're truthful with each other after years and years. I think that's the intimacy this couple has. After decades of being with each other and apart from each other, they can finally be truthful with each other.

This play is two people in a room. Did you set to do that or was that just how it worked out because of the story you were telling?
It worked out because of the story I was telling, but I really wanted to restrict it to that form. I don't change form out of restlessness, but I change form out of a fear of doing what I've done before. So I'm always looking for something that's a challenge, and two people in a room is both a real challenge because you have to build the story really carefully, but there's something wonderful about it because you get to spend time with really big scene that has all its ebbs and flows. Building that intimate dance between two people has been great -- to be able to dig into a relationship more deeply has been fun -- more fun than challenging, surprisingly.

You said when you told your wife about this, you told her it was going to be funny. Why did you want it to be funny?
I think material has the potential to be so visceral, so you have to temper it with humor. I think the humor is what makes it exciting and gives it the edge, but also my friends who inspired the first thoughts about it were really funny. They had this way of kind of making a joke about the world even though it wasn't funny (laughs). For me that's the best kind of humor because it's inexplicable and bittersweet and lively, and you can't quite put your finger on it.

Why did you name it Annapurna?
It had been sitting, and I couldn't find my way into it. My brother was visiting me, and he's really into backcountry sports, and he'd given me this book, Annapurna by Maurice Herzog, who led the first expedition to climb this 8,000-meter peak in 1950. It's this epic tale of this team of men who set about this challenge, and though it makes Maurice Herzog famous, it destroys him. He loses all of his toes and most of fingers to frostbite, and the pursuit of this thing kind of ruined him. I felt like there's the metaphor for this epic relationship this couple who have seen this bright seductive peak in the background, and they've tried to climb it and it's had this effect on them they will carry for the rest of their lives. That metaphor made the idea of the story come together for me.

Annapurna continues at the Magic Theatre through Dec. 4. Admission is $20-$60.