STAGE : Questions Are Unanswered in Donner Pass Survival Play

The winter of 1846-1847 was a hard, cold and killing one in the Sierra Nevada of Northern California.

Of 89 emigrants in a party trying to make its way to California that year, 42 died. Some died of the cold when snow blocked their path through the Wasatch Mountains. Some died of starvation.

But, for many people, the most harrowing tales of the so-called Donner Party were told by the survivors--because they survived by eating the flesh of their fallen companions.

The story of those survivors captivated the interest of scriptwriter Abe Polsky when he vacationed in that area 13 years ago.

“What terrible things would I do to survive? How far does each individual allow himself to go in a life-or-death situation?” he remembered asking himself. “It was a mystery at the core of human behavior.”

Polsky, in a phone interview from his home in Santa Barbara, said the mystery inspired him to write a play, “Devour the Snow” which had its world premiere at Cypress College in November, 1977. Even now, with the play having gone to Broadway and abroad, the mystery at the heart of the play is something that Polsky describes as eluding him still.

For that reason, Polsky said, he will be in the audience tonight when “Devour the Snow” opens at the North Coast Repertory Theatre.

“The actors always do something surprising and pleasing, perhaps something I haven’t seen before,” he said. “The story acts as a net to capture the emotions of the performers. You throw it in the ocean to see what fish are brought up from the sea.”

Polsky’s career has not been an inactive one, but “Devour the Snow” is his greatest popular success.

At 53, he is a 30-year veteran of episodic television (“Kung Fu”) and such obscure low-budget movies as “The Baby” and “Beware of Dog.” He said he is now teaching and working on an as-yet untitled comedy.

For some reason the idea and shape of “Devour the Snow” leaped out at him when he read a historical narrative he purchased at Donner Park. He credits part of his inspiration to his wife, Merrily, who helped him with research, and part to the Old Globe for giving him work as an actor in their 1957 summer Shakespeare festival here.

“My experience with Shakespeare gave me a sense of the size of what big drama could be and also sharpened my inner attention to theatrical material. When those elements of the play captured my attention, I saw a big, almost Shakespearean play. Characters bigger than life. That appealed to me.”

Another thing that appealed to Polsky was what he called “the dark side” of the material. “I think that every kind of writer develops an instinct or vision whenever they encounter an idea that has the peculiar elements that are right for the medium they work in. Those elements jumped out at me when I encountered a little item about how the survivors gathered at Sutter’s Fort.

“You might call it a caldron or a crucible, a coming together of elements. There is a dark figure, the central character, Lewis Keseberg, who tried taking this time at the fort to institute a trial or hearing to clear his name. This character, and the incident of the hearing that occurred in one day, had all the elements of a tragedy.”

Of course, it also had all the elements of a mystery--although the nature of the suspense for Polsky is no longer what it was years ago when he was worrying about the reception for the play.