EDMONTON — “Welcome to this temple of the imagination!” cries an exuberantly bearded gent of the eye-twinkler persuasion at the start of Shipwrecked! The Amazing Adventures of Louis de Rougemont (as told by himself). “The hallowed hall where stories are told!”

Ah, that would be a theatre. And in the case of this lively testimonial on behalf of kidnapping imagination and transporting it clean off the map, it’s the lower hall of Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Strathcona. That’s where Edmonton’s newest theatre company, Atlas, has raised its red curtain on a curious little play, by Pulitzer-winner Donald Margulies, that embraces old-fashioned storytelling with creative gusto, and then wonders about it. It’s a spirited calling card by Atlas artistic director Julien Arnold.

Our narrator Louis, played with flamboyant geniality by Glenn Nelson, is reviewing his own life of extraordinary adventures, assisted, as he explains, by two helpers, Davina Stewart and Mark Meer. Player No. 1 and Player No. 2 busily provide all the characters (and animals) the intrepid Victorian adventurer meets in the course of long and tumultuous sea voyages, fantastical tropical island exiles, tribal warfare, transcontinental treks.

They “do” all the climatic reversals, too, the wild storms and the deadly whirlpools.

On a set consisting largely of vintage travel trunks, they invent the soundscape of Louis’s life before your very eyes. That they use simple homely objects for this — a sealer jar of coins or a metal handle snapping on a leather case — is part of the fun, and the point, of Shipwrecked!

The storyteller, as we see by the engaging Nelson who uses his bushy eyebrows and the perpetual present tense to full effect, has a flair for the dramatic.

“Chapter One,” he announces. “The seeds of adventure are sown: I am born.” With Stewart playing mom, Louis, a true-life personage, presents his sickly, bookish childhood self of the 1860s.

At 16, his imagination fuelled by a diet of adventure stories, he sets forth to see the world for himself. He emerges into the urban jostle of London, ably provided by Stewart and Meer, and at once gets a gig on a pearl-fishing expedition to the Coral Sea, off Australia.

With copious “arghhhs,” Stewart provides a comically high-decibel, old-school, rum-soaked sea captain whom the play offers perhaps a tad too much stage time. Meer is entirely convincing, and at his most endearing, as the soulful-eyed mutt Bruno who becomes Louis’s new best friend. Sea travel is not short on incident. A giant octopus, for example, rises from the deep to ensnare a passing fisherman to a watery grave: Both are played, ingeniously, by Meer.

There are storms, deadly calms, last-moment rescues, startling encounters with hostile natives, and an island life in which our castaway rides sea turtles. Stewart is charming as the aborigine maiden with whom Louis finds love and unexpected skill as an English-as-a-

second-language tutor. “Our eyes meet. The gulf between our vastly different cultures narrows considerably.”

Years pass. Later, Louis reappears in London, and becomes an instant celebrity when his memoirs are serialized.

When his veracity is attacked by skeptics, we are left with questions. Is he an autobiographer? A hoaxer? A fabulist? Does he do with reality what all artists do?

We’re left with the questions. Meanwhile, though, we’ve had a compelling voyage of our own.

lnicholls@edmontonjournal.com

Theatre Review

Shipwrecked! The Amazing Adventures

of Louis de Rougemont

Theatre: Atlas

Written by: Donald Margulies

Directed by: Julien Arnold

Starring: Glenn Nelson, Davina Stewart, Mark Meer

Where: Holy Trinity Anglican Church, 84th Avenue and 101st Street

Running: Through Feb. 27

Tickets: Tix on the Square (780-420-1757) or at the door