‘Everest’ is too much of a climb

Certainly, it takes guts for an award-winning theater like the Colony to commit to a completely new play. However, the Colony’s world premiere of “Climbing Everest” is a textbook example of good intentions gone badly awry.

Inspired by “Antigone,” playwright Margit Ahlin based her tale on the single-minded quest of a young woman to retrieve her brother’s body from the frozen wastes of Everest.

For the Greeks, burial was an essential ritual, and the efforts of Antigone to inter her fallen brother against the edict of the king resound across the centuries as a grave and noble endeavor. Unfortunately, that essential nobility eludes Ahlin’s protagonist, Mallory Falconer (Katie A. Keane), whose bullheaded efforts to recover her brother, at grave peril to those who accompany her, seem unmotivated and sadly chimerical.

Mallory was named by her father, George (Tom Dugan), after a famed Everest explorer, as were her siblings Shipton (Matthew Siegan) and Hillary (Aubrey Joy Saverino). A prominent mountaineer in his own right, George was killed in an avalanche two years earlier, his body lost in the wastes. Shipton recently perished after climbing Everest and has been left permanently languishing on a slope near the summit.

In the grip of her obsession, Mallory enlists her wealthy British admirer Hunter (Aaron Hendry), an idealized beau straight out of a Harlequin novel, to join her in an expedition to fetch Shipton’s remains. Financing their mission is Hunter’s reluctant but munificent “Pater back in Blighty,” Sir Andrew (Dugan), George’s onetime climbing buddy.

The bare bones of Ahlin’s plot are at least roughly plausible. But there’s too much folderol in this fervid mix, including a hilariously unlikely love triangle among Mallory, the patient but unrequited Hunter and Jinwu (Feodor Chin), a Chinese functionary who helps Mallory circumvent local bureaucracy. Oh, did we mention Jinwu happens to be a world-class climber who also lost a brother on Everest?

Added to the chain of improbability and coincidence is an avalanche of florid dialogue that is alternately reiterative and prosaic. At about 25,000 feet, Mallory muses, “The wind sweeps away everything here. There’s only truth.” To which Hunter replies, “Yes. Come to my tent.” And off they go for a little oxygen-deprived canoodling.

To give director Al D’Andrea his due, this busy drama must have been a bear to stage, but the resulting production is roughly competent at best. Although it serves the physical demands of the play, Yevgenia Nayberg’s set design is almost preternaturally ugly. Steve Young’s lighting is more successful, and Drew Dalzell’s sound is excellent.

Keane has an uphill struggle in every sense, but despite her valiant efforts to make Mallory sympathetic, her character still comes across as petty, whiny and deluded -- hardly attributes associated with a classical heroine. Perhaps Ahlin intended Mallory’s narcissistic foibles to reflect a postmodern temperament, somewhat along the lines of the vain pseudo-journalist in Jon Krakauer’s Everest tale “Into Thin Air.” However, despite its vaulting intentions, “Climbing Everest” proves a nadir for the Colony.

*

‘Climbing Everest’

Where: Colony Theatre, 555 N. 3rd St., Burbank

When: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays. Call for additional performances.

Ends: May 8

Price: $26 to $36

Contact: (818) 558-7000

Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes