Stageworks scales new heights with ‘Touching the Void’

The challenges of putting a mountain climbing drama onstage, and making it taut, suspenseful and most of all believable, loomed overhead like an impossible summit.

Karla Hartley, artistic director of Tampa’s Stageworks Theatre, never met a challenge she didn’t like. Armed with confidence (“Artists are meant to push these boundaries”) 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.

It’s a true story. The events took place in 1985.

The biggest challenge, Hartley said, was how to facilitate the staging. “I 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.”

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.

In Daniel Greig’s script, there’s a fifth character: The mountain itself.

Designed and built by Tom Hansen of Suncoast Productions, “Siula Grande” 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 “ice” ridges.

And sometimes, they fall. That’s part of the story.

“It’s the most expensive set we’ve done,” Hartley said. “And to find the people who could act it, who could climb it, who could handle the dialects, it’s been a very special process. And I’m super proud of it.

“I’ve always wanted to use the space in very different ways. And this is a pretty good start.”

From left; McVaugh, Henley-Beasley, Mays and Rivera.

Casting was crucial, Hartley explained. “Here’s what I needed: I need actors who were physically able to tackle this play. It’s not an easy play to do. It was important that people be fit. And that’s not usually something that I concern myself with in an audition process – I’m not super hung up on what people look like.”

Clearwater’s Vertical Ventures came in as a collaborator to train the actors on climbing methodology and technique (only Rivera had previous experience with the sport).

The rest was up to the cast. “I’ve been up on a mountain, but I didn’t try to act while I was doing it,” said Hartley. “I had to rely on them, and their capabilities, to say ‘No, I can’t do it this way; I can maybe do it that way.’ So there was a lot of experimentation with the staging – what’s going to work? What’s going to not? How do you move around on that mountain for an hour plus and keep it fresh?”

At nearly two and a half hours, Touching the Void could have been an endurance test for the audience. But it’s an edge-of-your-seat thrill ride – a real cliffhanger, if you will – that connects and engages and seems to fly like a wild toboggan.

And there’s 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.

“We’re all in survival mode,” she pointed out. “We’re all dragging ourselves across this mountain … we don’t know what’s going to happen next. The play turns out to be the perfect metaphor for society as we look at it today. We’re all trying to survive.”

Touching the Void runs through Feb. 1. For showtimes, tickets and additional information, visit the Stageworks website.