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<\/p>\nThe challenges of putting a mountain climbing drama onstage, and making it taut, suspenseful and most of all believable, loomed overhead like an impossible summit.<\/p>\n
Karla Hartley, artistic director of Tampa\u2019s Stageworks Theatre, never met a challenge she didn\u2019t like. Armed with confidence (\u201cArtists are meant to push these boundaries\u201d) and surrounding herself with a team of risk-taking professionals, she dived into Touching the Void, the 2018 stage play about two British climbers scaling a perilous peak in the Andes Mountains of Peru.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a true story. The events took place in 1985.<\/p>\n
The biggest challenge, Hartley said, was how to facilitate the staging. \u201cI knew that I could not do it without that mountain in place. There was just no way. And I knew I needed the set finished and done before we started rehearsals.\u201d<\/p>\n
Touching the Void calls for four actors. In the Stageworks production, Luis Rivera and Robert Logan Mays portray the thrill-seeking (but well-trained) young climbers. Brianna McVaugh and Seth Henley-Beasley constitute their ground-level support team.<\/p>\n
In Daniel Greig\u2019s script, there\u2019s a fifth character: The mountain itself.<\/p>\n
Designed and built by Tom Hansen of Suncoast Productions, \u201cSiula Grande\u201d is 18 feet high and 20 feet wide. The abstract white structure is made of wood and aluminum, and for more than half of the play, Rivera and Mays climb it, rappel down it, explore it, dangle from it and slide along perilously angled \u201cice\u201d ridges.<\/p>\n
And sometimes, they fall. That\u2019s part of the story.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s the most expensive set we\u2019ve done,\u201d Hartley said. \u201cAnd to find the people who could act it, who could climb it, who could handle the dialects, it\u2019s been a very special process. And I\u2019m super proud of it.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve always wanted to use the space in very different ways. And this is a pretty good start.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
From left; McVaugh, Henley-Beasley, Mays and Rivera.<\/p>\n
Casting was crucial, Hartley explained. \u201cHere\u2019s what I needed: I need actors who were physically able to tackle this play. It\u2019s not an easy play to do. It was important that people be fit. And that\u2019s not usually something that I concern myself with in an audition process \u2013 I\u2019m not super hung up on what people look like.\u201d<\/p>\n
Clearwater\u2019s Vertical Ventures came in as a collaborator to train the actors on climbing methodology and technique (only Rivera had previous experience with the sport).<\/p>\n
The rest was up to the cast. \u201cI\u2019ve been up on a mountain, but I didn\u2019t try to act while I was doing it,\u201d said Hartley. \u201cI had to rely on them, and their capabilities, to say \u2018No, I can\u2019t do it this way; I can maybe do it that way.\u2019 So there was a lot of experimentation with the staging \u2013 what\u2019s going to work? What\u2019s going to not? How do you move around on that mountain for an hour plus and keep it fresh?\u201d<\/p>\n
At nearly two and a half hours, Touching the Void could have been an endurance test for the audience. But it\u2019s an edge-of-your-seat thrill ride \u2013 a real cliffhanger, if you will \u2013 that connects and engages and seems to fly like a wild toboggan.<\/p>\n
And there\u2019s one more thing. Without state funding, Stageworks, like all theater companies, is facing financial struggles on a daily basis. A welcome infusion of monetary support from the Porter Wright law firm got that Andean peak built, just the way Hartley and her creative team envisioned it.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re all in survival mode,\u201d she pointed out. \u201cWe\u2019re all dragging ourselves across this mountain \u2026 we don\u2019t know what\u2019s going to happen next. The play turns out to be the perfect metaphor for society as we look at it today. We\u2019re all trying to survive.\u201d<\/p>\n