Leave it to the New Group to show us a side of Nick Offerman we haven’t seen before — his bare butt.
In “Annapurna,” the new play by Sharr White (“The Other Place,” “The Snow Geese”), the “Parks and Recreation” star makes his entrance clad in nothing but an apron, a portable oxygen tank strapped to his body. As a shorthand method of establishing a character, it can’t be beat.
That character is Ulysses, a once-celebrated poet and professor who’s fallen on hard times. Wracked with emphysema and living alone in a Colorado trailer park in what he calls “the ass crack of the Rockies,” he’s startled by the arrival of Emma (Megan Mullally), the wife who left him, without explanation, 20 years earlier.
All he can think to say is, “Holy crap!”
Emma has come to prepare her ex for a visit by the son he hasn’t seen since she spirited them both out of Ulysses’ life. And she’s trying to help, vigorously cleaning his grimy trailer and then presenting him with $17,000 in cash.
The comic banter soon gives way to emotionally charged exchanges about their past. Ulysses, a recovering alcoholic whose letters to his son over the years went unanswered, is bitter about the abandonment and professes to have no idea why it happened. And Emma, whose bruises testify to an abusive second marriage, is finally ready to tell him.
Offerman and Mullally (late of “Will and Grace”), who are married in real life, have a strong chemistry onstage. But their efforts — and Bart DeLorenzo’s subtle staging — are undone by the schematic writing, which uneasily veers from comic shtick to melodramatic revelations.
Still, it’s a pleasure to watch them stretch from their familiar sitcom personas. Offerman beautifully conveys Ulysses’ wounded pride and stubborn determination to die in his own way, while Mullally is deeply moving as the woman who still loves him but who can’t forget the horrors of the past.
“Annapurna” — the title refers to a mountain range in the Himalayas — strives mightily for dramatic heights, but it fails to reach the peak.