The premise is that a starving-artist opera composer who makes her living writing music for video games has been up for 36 hours. Her name is Kat. She's brilliant, if only the world could understand that. She's brave, or at least she thought she was before her man walked out on her to be in a Journey cover band, leaving her with their 5-month-old baby. And she's hallucinating. Maybe. Who knows. Inexplicably, she finds herself Skyping with Ernest Shackleton, indomitable explorer of Antarctica who was supposed to have died in 1922. The idea that connects these two characters is that musicians, like antarctic explorers, are risky investments. They can understand each other, help each other out, maybe even love each other.

Tech-wise, the show works: a creative mix of antiquated and contemporary gadgets, and production designer Alexander V. Nichols creates a nice analogy between the coldness of technology and the coldness of the apartment. And the songs Kat's writing (composed by Brendan Milburn) are suitably cold, looping electro—fitting in well with the icy motif. There are a few clever lines in the script (by Joe DiPietro), but there are never clever lines in the songs. The lyrics, by Valerie Vigoda, who also plays Kat, are nothing but bland clichés interspersed with bombastic clichés, always awkwardly striving for rhymes, falling far short of brilliant: "And when the baby cries and cries/And when the baby daddy calls and tells me lies/And when it's all too much for me/I drop the phone, I press record, and I am free..." If we are supposed to be on board with the idea that she is a brilliant writer of operas, well, mission not accomplished. But Wade McCollum's Shackleton is funnier than you'd expect, thanks to McCollum's gift for physical comedy.