It's interesting how playing space influences a production. Theaters in Honolulu that produce live drama can be too hot or too cold, offer uncomfortable seats or poor sight lines, or choose pieces that aren't a good fit for the space available.

Most producing organizations here have avoided Patrick Meyer's mountain-climber drama "K2," because it takes place in an ice cave 27,000 feet up on the world's second-highest peak. Its 1983 Broadway production used a soaring wall of ice that started in the orchestra pit and disappeared into open space above the stage.

Who would try putting all that into the postage-stamp playing space at The Yellow Brick Studio in Kaka'ako, where patrons in the first row could trip an actor by stretching out their legs?

But The Actors' Group is nothing if not risk-taking, and director Dennis Proulx has championed this play for years. Proulx mounted a successful scaled-down version in 2002 in the Windward Community College Little Theater, and brings back the original two-man cast for this production.

It's performed inside a shadow-box picture frame, realistically sized to be big enough to hold two men with just enough room to stand upright. The audience sees the action from inside the mountain.

The dialogue is intensely personal, as the pair must cope with planning a descent that only one of them can make. Panic is accentuated by hypothermia, dehydration and oxygen-deprivation. Understandably, the characters teeter on the dangerous edge of melodrama.

Eric Nemoto and Wil Kahele successfully reprise their original roles.

The action part goes to Nemoto as Taylor, a cynical attorney at the end of a long line of failed relationships. Etched by desperation and fear, he's literally and figuratively at the end of his rope and must be persuaded to risk everything by going over the edge one more time.

Kahele's Howard is more contemplative. A devoted family man immobilized by a broken leg, he delivers a powerful closing monologue describing blind arctic foxes that peacefully accept their deaths.

Ultimately, the playwright has scripted a buddy action drama that is also a character study and a spiritual examination of life. "Funny what you talk about when you're going to die."

The mountain becomes its own metaphor. "The higher you go, the deeper you get," and "just holding on" means survival.

But there are moments where humor balances the equation: "We shoulda stuck with dirt bikes."

The play's contemplative nature has a spiritual quality, accentuated by its opening music of Gregorian chant and the background sound of swirling wind. Its realistic demands, however, including an avalanche, can strain credibility.

Success depends on the actors' ability to get the audience inside the characters and to keep them undistracted by melodrama and stage effects. The production I saw in Kane'ohe worked beautifully. The recent night in Kaka'ako was marred by a patron who took a call on a cell phone and another who convulsed into uncontrollable giggles.

Undeniably, in such close quarters, the audience also shapes the experience.