Synopsis

Henry Lewis Stimson was U.S. Secretary of War to presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. He was also a pivotal figure in the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. But these facts make up only one crucial strand in The Third Ascent . . . . What also fascinates Moher — and this provides the provocative philosophical basis for his play — is the fact that Stimson was the first white man to climb Chief Mountain, a foreboding and mythic peak on the Alberta-Montana border . . . . On the mountain, Stimson finds himself forced to confront the truth of his own role in the Hiroshima bombings. And if he hopes that the climb to the top of Chief Mountain will provide a kind of absolution, of spiritual cleansing, he is tragically mistaken. The Third Ascent is first and foremost a character study, a compassionate examination of moral fallibility. ‘I am not the government incarnate,’ protests the aging Stimson at one critical point. ‘I am only one man.’ But Stimson’s long-time Indian guide, Thomas Whitefeather, also makes compromises. At one point, he bitterly denounces the aging statesman for his complicity in the Hiroshima bombing . . . . At the next, he ruefully confesses he now guides ordinary people to the summit in order to make money. Various concerns surface in this richly textured and absorbing play — the immorality of war, obviously, but also such matters as human guilt and expiation, the sinister workings of racism, the mysterious influence of legend on even the most pragmatic of civilizations, and the fragility of human certainty.