About the Play:

Winner of the 1984 Obie Award for Best Play

Terra Nova is a full length drama by Ted Tally. British explorer Robert Scott's disastrous race with Norwegian Roald Amundsen to be the first to the South Pole forms the dramatic core of this Obie-winning play. Drawn from the journals and letters found on the frozen body of Captain Scott, Terra Nova captures the sweep – and personalities – crucial to this compelling study of heroism in the face of bitter failure. Especially recommended for school and contest use.

Terra Nova tells the 1911 story of five Englishmen and five Norwegians who race each other to the bottom of the world, with only the Norwegians returning. The focus is on the Englishmen – depicting the final days of Robert Falcon Scott's ill-fated expedition. The story follows the explorer and his men at various stages of their ordeal, with flashbacks of Scott and his young wife at home and with fateful glimpses of his Norwegian rival, Roald Amundsen, whose party beat him to the South Pole. Refusing the use of sled dogs as unsporting, Scott and his team struggle to drag their heavy gear across a frozen wasteland, only to find that Amundsen has preceded them to their goal. The play is also a study of the British code of honour and upper-class resolve – Scott's aristocratic sense of destiny and command and his young bride's ability to understand her husband's compulsive drive while failing to accept his motivations. But it is in the tragic trip back, as the members of the expedition die one by one, that Terra Nova captures with chilling intensity the awesome bravery of men who realize that suffering and death will be their only reward, as well as the remarkable courage of the families who must carry on in their absence.

Terra Nova premiered in 1977 at Yale Repertory Theatre, the internationally celebrated professional theater in residence at Yale School of Drama in New Haven, Connecticut. Since then the play was performed more than 70 times, from Stockholm to Santa Fe, from New Zealand to Great Britain, from Alaska to Florida, before opening in 1984 at The American Place Theater off-Broadway in New York, and that production went on to win the playwright an Obie Award. It's still enormously popular, and has been a staple of community theatres, regional repertory houses, and high schools since then.

Cast: 1 female, 6 male

What people say:

"…an impressive first work…." — The Hollywood Reporter

"…explores the heart of courage in a white hell of adversity." — Time Magazine

"Mr. Tally is a most literate writer." — The New York Times

About the Playwright:

Ted Tally is an an Academy Award-winning American playwright and screenwriter. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, his plays include Terra Nova, which received an Obie Award. In 1991, he won an Academy Award for his adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs. He continues to write screenplays and movies.