Name a main character Ulysses and unless he’s a Civil War general, you’ve got “The Odyssey” on your mind. The Ulysses in “Annapurna” hasn’t done much traveling to get back to his wife – he hasn’t been to the Himalayan mountain that provides the title (more on that later) – but he has been lost for 20 years.

It’s his wife, ex-wife actually – her name is Emma, not Penelope – who makes the journey from somewhere to get back to him in nowhere, a lonely dump of a trailer in the Colorado Rockies.

And so begins Sharr White’s beguiling and deeply moving play, a drama that enfolds as it unfolds, rich in truth and metaphor, about two people who have badly damaged each other, and yet…

At the start, “Annapurna” might be a comedy, with Ulysses (Richard McWilliams) standing bare-assed at the stove when a woman, comes to the door. That would be Emma (Michelle Mountain), surprising Ulysses two decades after she left in the middle of the night with their five-year-old son.

Why she has come back is explained fairly quickly. She has found out that Ulysses is gravely ill and there are things that need to be said. “Just because you leave somebody,” Emma declares, “doesn’t mean you’re not in a relationship.” Why she left is the greater mystery, revealed as the play’s layers are peeled back, not unlike the onion Emma works on as she fixes a sandwich (metaphors, many metaphors).

White has an enviable talent for letting his characters disclose their back stories in the natural course of their conversation. Ulysses, a poet and college professor, drank too much, smoked too much and, when Emma left him, fell apart, lost his job and has wallowed in grief and pain ever since. Emma fled to the East Coast, married another professor of poetry, gave up her career for parenthood, and has left her husband just as suddenly as she left Ulysses.

McWilliams and Mountain are so in synch that it’s difficult to talk about one’s performance without discussing the other’s. Through stance and voice, McWilliams shows how Ulysses’ hurting transcends the merely physical. Through touch, through movement, Mountain conveys Emma’s willingness to assuage before she can acknowledge it verbally.

The play could remain fairly static and still work, but the actors and director Guy Sanville present a masterpiece of blocking and exquisite timing. Bartley H. Bauer’s grubby set, Dana L. White’s lighting atmospheric, Suzanne Young’s down-home costumes, Tom Whalen’s well-placed, natural sounds (sizzling meat, a running shower…) and Danna Segrest’s props all contribute to the sense that we’re eavesdropping on something real.

As for the title, Ulysses talks about the first expedition to reach the peak of Annapurna, in the 1950s. The climbers made it, but the casualties were horrific. You may be pondering that long after the play ends.