Thursday, January 16, 2020

Moby Dick: A Play Review



A review of the 2020 Rogue Theatre production of Moby Dick as adapted by Cynthia Meier and Holly Griffiths

 

How does one comment on a play that so audaciously attempts to distill the essence of arguably America’s greatest novel, Moby Dick, into about two and a half hours.  Suffice it to say that this production doesn’t cover all of the hundreds of pages of the novel, but it sure gives it a run for its money. Let me say upfront that it is totally engrossing, intense, dense, inventive,  visually entrancing, and acted with the kind of total conviction that only a close knit and dedicated company can provide.  

 

The adapters, Cynthia Meier (also the director) and Holly Griffith chose to give us a good deal of Ishmael’s narrative in a straight forward stage manager style and then allow the dramatic scenes to flow seamlessly into focus. The novel is pretty much devoid of female presence, but Meier and Griffith come up with a trio of women to enhance the theme as well as portray multiple characters, sound technicians, and invisible stagehands in the Japanese Noh tradition.  The women are personified as the Three Fates of Greek mythology, who spin the threads of human destiny. In antiquity Clotho spun the “thread” of human fate, Lachesis dispensed it, and Atropos cut the thread (thus determining the individual’s moment of death).  In this production they are called the Severer, the Spinner, and the Measurer. Meier notes in the playbill that the word “fate” appears 23 times in the novel and the inclusion of the Fates as characters in the play seemed true to the spirit of Melville’s thinking about free will vs determinism. From my point of view this decision was crucial to the success of the drama on stage since it turned a philosophical argument into visible theatrical conflict. While opening the cast to more female players, it also led to many of the most moving visual effects. To Meier and Griffith go the accolades for coming up with this vehicle.

 

Like many of the audience who have read the novel, my exposure to Moby Dick dates to an undergraduate literature course some fifty years ago. A more recent memory is of the movie star Gregory Peck standing at a mast and raging at the elements like a mad King Lear.  The Ahab of this production, as portrayed by Joe McGrath, was a more compact physical presence and definitely not wildly attacking the universe or his nemesis the great white whale at every moment.  McGrath’s Ahab seemed more reserved, more cool, more rational, more practical in his pursuit. “Make me a new leg” he says to the carpenter and let’s get on with it. Finally, though, he still wants his revenge at all costs and like many tragic heroes before him he finds the cost to be fatal. I must admit to being not quite so happy with Aaron Shand’s Ishmael.  I wish he had brought a more nuanced basket of vocal shading to his narrative. Was he expecting too much from the music and lighting to deepen the emotional coloring in his narrative?  He held the ground, but I was not feeling a compulsion to listen to him.

 

While speaking of music let me give Russell Ronnebaum’s musical direction and composition  a large shout out. Accompanied by percussionist Paul Gibson the live  music provided a constant underscoring that helped to merge the voices, the choreography, and the music into an operatic whole. We were seated right next to the musician’s visible position and can attest that they literally became cast members.  At one point Ronnebaum was timing the live action while tapping a drum cradled on his chest with his left hand and also playing the  piano with the other hand.  Stupendous!

 

Among other members of the cast, I found Ryan Parker’s Starbuck and Jeffrey Baden’s Queequeg to be particularly worthy of mention.  And Owen Saunders, as the youngest member of the ill fated crew, made me shed a tear as he was enclosed in a sad but loving embrace by Patty Gallagher’s Morta.  Though not given many lines a good deal of the fluid choreography of Daniel Precup  fell to the movement patterns executed by the three fates-- the Ms’s Gallagher, Booth, and Griffith. The Oriental theatre and Mary Zimmerman once again provided the impetus for the striking use of billowing fabrics together with lighting to manufacture the illusion of giant whales  entrapping ropes, and the seething  ocean.  These effects, although produced by minimalism,  easily embodied the profundity that Melville was intending.   

 

Throughout this production Meier’s stage pictures are varied and masterful. These include among many  “Thar she blows” shouted from the crow’s nest to the crew below and the remarkable illusion of a thrown harpoon delivered to the hands of a Fate and then carried off stage toward an unseen target.  I was also taken by the progressions from day to night to dawn while the crew becomes ever more weary under the pressures of heat and hunting.  The ensemble was king here. Their focus was supreme. Each pull on an oar, or rope, or their laying down to sleep, or their freezes to shift back to the narrative seemed impeccable. Their physical control and their concentration came right down to tiny manifestations like a mouth open suspended in the midst of a word, a hand held high with finger pointing, a body tensed and held caught in the action of pulling on a rope.

 

We are left to think about all that has befallen Ahab and his crew. The biblical parallels are both telling and ironic. We experience the tale of Jonah and the whale at the beginning and complete it with a flood that drowns all but the survivor who floats to salvation on the coffin of a non-Christian. There are many  threes to think about. There are the three Fates and the  three chances to spear the mighty whale.  I was also reminded of the three witches in Macbeth which allows us to end with a full complement of the tragic ironies that befall the obsessed from Oedipus to Macbeth to Ahab. At the end their hubris sucks them all down. At the deadly yet beautiful end of this production  Ahab and crew surrender to the enfolding billowing arms of the sea. Nothing remains but a bleached white carcass on a far flung shore. 

 

Jim De Young

January, 2020

 

 

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