Theater: Hell in Ice

Hell in IceDEVOUR THE SNOW by Abe Polsky

The fate of the Donner Party is a macabre legend in the winning of the West. A group of families set out from Illinois for California in 1846. Trapped in the Sierra Nevada Mountains by an early snowfall, they built crude shelters of logs and hides. They ate their animals and their shoes. But the darkest art of the 47 survivors out of a party of 82 was to eat their own dead.

Out of this dire saga, Polsky has fashioned a grim drama about the existential anguish of last resorts. The play is fascinating even when its revelations are most appalling. Presented at off-Broadway’s Hudson Guild Theater, Devour the Snow differs markedly from the spate of terminal situation dramas now in vogue in that it does not possess a moment of comic relief. Polsky means his play to be harrowing, and it is.

He has used a little-known incident as the fulcrum of the drama. A survivor, Lewis Keseberg (Jon De Vries), instituted a slander trial against other members of the group, led by James Reed (Berkeley Harris), who had accused him of theft and murder. Though Keseberg won his suit, the trial records do not exist, so the play is an imaginative reconstruction.

The thought that grips the playgoer’s imagination as he views the courtroom is that apart from the presiding officer, John A. Sutler (Paul David Richards), and Sheriff McKinstry (Bob Ari), most of the people present can only be there through having eaten human flesh.

On the physical level, the trial is concerned with who ate whom when. Evenin cannibalism a pecking order is revealed. No particular stigma seems to be attached to having eaten two loyal Indian guides. Keseberg, being a German, is supposed to have acted out of depravity, while the native Americans pleadpure necessity. When Keseberg reveals that he ate his own dead daughter, the horror of the primal taboo seems to invade the playhouse. It is as if one were present at the banquet at which Atreus served up to his brother Thyestes the three sons of Thyestes, and the father, having learned what he had eaten, pronounced the awesome anathema that resonates through all of Greek tragedy.

Devour the Snow is a profoundly moral play in the guise of a murder thriller. Polsky probes areas of guilt, self-deception, self-corruption and the agonizing question of “What price survival?” The cast is exemplary, and Jon De Vries as the tormented Keseberg sculptures a portrait of hell in ice. Toward the end, Polsky resorts to melodramatic devices that break the play’s stark tension, but he is a welcome addition to the select company of playwriting naturals.

—T.E. Kalem