Death looms large in young Hanna Hauser’s world — as stark and imposing as the mountains that surround her Alpine village — while life is as harsh as the howling winds that blow in every fall and portend the arrival of snow. Hanna’s brother, Melk, died suddenly and mysteriously two years earlier, a death that her father, Jakob, and the village pastor, Father Hoffmann, describe as “dying of melancholy.” As the second anniversary of Melk’s death approaches, the unanswered questions surrounding it echo through Hanna’s family and their isolated dairy farming community like the sounds of yodeling that punctuate the sound design of ExPats Theatre’s new production of Cold Country by Swiss playwright Reto Finger, now playing at Atlas Performing Arts Center.
When Finger was a child, his family moved to a small village in the Emmental region of the Alps, where, as he shared with ExPats founder Karin Rosnizeck in a recent interview, “in a way, we always felt like strangers.” The harsh climate of the Alps, the Christian and pagan myths and folklore that haunt the landscape and its residents, and the childhood experience of feeling like an outsider or an observer in an insular community are all deeply felt in Cold Country.
Translated and directed by Rosnizeck, ExPats’ production of Cold Country opens with voiced-over narration of a mythical tale weaving together elements of several Alpine legends, backed by swelling strings and ethereal yodeling (sound design by Rosnizeck, Laura Schlachtmeyer, David Bryan Jackson, and Andrew Bellware) as stunning black-and-white footage of snowy peaks appears on a screen at the back of the stage (Tennessee Dixon, projections designer). Finger’s opening fable features a dairy farmer named Macolvi haunted by the death of his daughter and demanding a reckoning from the divine, and is retold by Hanna and referenced by her parents throughout the play, serving as a frame story for the Hausers’ own.
As patriarch Jakob Hauser, Michael Crowley grieves his son with brooding, barely suppressed anger, which erupts as he slams his fist on the table in the family home and berates his wife Kathrin (Melissa B. Robinson) and daughter Hanna (Sadie O’Conor) when they retreat into their own silences. He colludes with Cold Country’s other patriarchal figure, Father Hoffmann (David Bryan Jackson), to conceal the circumstances of Melk’s death from Kathrin and Hanna, even as he privately tells the pastor, “You know Melk didn’t die of melancholy!”
Where Crowley’s Jakob hides the truth behind silence, Jackson, as Father Hoffmann, obfuscates with pious platitudes: “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.” The increasingly creepy attention he pays to Hanna when she comes to decorate her brother’s grave reveals Jackson’s Father Hoffmann as a more sinister figure than the well-meaning but tone-deaf old man he initially appears to be.
Under the disapproving gaze of her father (who refers to her as “the kid” rather than by her name) and the lecherous gaze of the pastor, Sadie O’Conor as Hanna retreats into defiant silence and grows increasingly desperate to escape the village and its constant reminders of her brother’s death. Dressed in black and gray throughout the play (Donna Breslin, costume designer), and conveying deep emotion through her facial expressions and body language, O’Conor’s Hanna is a young woman stretched taut by the grief and rage she represses in the presence of her parents and Father Hoffmann. She opens up only to the audience and to a tourist from the city, Tobias (Elgin Martin), who arrives in the village intending to climb the nearby mountain with his roommate Jasmin (Maryanne Henderson).
While Martin delivers an earnest performance as Tobias, eager to soak up the beauty of the mountain world that Hanna longs to escape, and Henderson provides the play’s few moments of comic relief in her brief scenes as Jasmin, they often feel less like developed characters and more like a plot device that Finger uses to allow the presence and perspective of outsiders to challenge the stories the villagers tell and the silences they keep.
The stories — and the silences — surrounding Melk’s death are challenged with increasing intensity by Hanna and, more understatedly, by her mother Kathrin (a weary and long-suffering Melissa B. Robinson) as the play progresses, setting in motion an explosive chain of events that echo the mythical frame story.
Director and translator Rosnizeck describes Cold Country as Finger’s “most Swiss play,” and ExPats’ production, from Dixon’s projections of Alpine scenery to the yodeling featured heavily in the sound design to the recurring folkloric motifs, feels uniquely and particularly Swiss. Yet the themes it explores, of life and death and the fragile boundary between them, are universal — and portrayed in scenes as stark and breathtaking as the Alps themselves.
Running Time: Approximately 90 minutes, without intermission.
Cold Country plays through October 19, 2025 (Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 pm, Saturdays and Sundays at 2:30 pm), presented by ExPats Theatre, performing at Atlas Performing Arts Center, Lab Theatre II, 1333 H St NE, Washington, DC. Tickets ($29.75–$54.75) are available online.
Cold Country
By Reto Finger
Translated and directed by Karin Rosnizeck
CAST
Jakob Hauser: Michael Crowley
Kathrin Hauser: Melissa B. Robinson
Hanna Hauser: Sadie O’Conor
Father Hoffmann: David Bryan Jackson
Tobias: Elgin Martin
Jasmin: Maryanne Henderson
CREATIVE TEAM
Director: Karin Rosnizeck
Stage Manager: Amberrain Andrews
Fight/Intimacy Choreographer: Jon Beal
Costume Designer: Donna Breslin
Lighting Designer: Ian Claar
Scenic/Projections Designer: Tennessee Dixon
Sound Design: Karin Rosnizeck, Laura Schlachtmeyer, David Bryan Jackson, Andrew Bellware
SEE ALSO:
Expats Theatre to present ‘Cold Country’ by Swiss playwright Reto Finger (news story, August 28, 2025)
