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Sunday, September 05, 2010

Road's 'Moby Dick' reminiscent of opera

By Barry Gaines
For the Journal
          Call me impressed. Herman Melville's 1851 novel of whaling and wailing does not appear an ideal candidate for theatrical reconstruction. But Mother Road's production of the stage adaptation of "Moby Dick" by Julian Rad with Hilary Adams is at once epic and accessible.
        Director Julia Thudium and actor Vic Browder designed the lighting and Laura Brunette the sound. Combined with the excellent nine-man cast, they create the saga of the "Pequod" on the bare stage of The Filling Station.
        Sailors pantomime their duties and haunted Captain Ahab limps toward confrontation with his nemesis, the giant, hump-backed white whale called Moby Dick. Adapter Rad mines the play's dialogue from the novel, cutting characters and episodes but retaining the book's molten core.
        In Act One, we meet the ship's crew and officers. John Hardman plays a couple of sailors, and Ruben Muller is the carpenter who has to repair Ahab's wooden leg — the result of the captain's last encounter with the white whale. Ernest W. Sturdevant is a blacksmith and the music director.
        Brian Haney plays Flask as volatile but fun. Vic Browder is excellent as Stubb, "good-humored, easy, and careless" as Melville describes him.
        First mate Starbuck, played with complexity by Peter Diseth, tries to dissuade Ahab from his quest of the whale, and, like Hamlet, is unable to kill the man who must be killed. Narrating the story is Ishmael portrayed by Kelly O'Keefe whose speech is a bit rushed at times.
        Marc Lynch presents an imposing presence as Queequeg, the cannibal islander with a harpoon of gold. As Ahab, Nicholas Ballas is both compelling and understated — obsessed but not mad. He commands the ship and the stage, and his Shakespearean experience prepares him for Ahab's long soliloquies.
        It is not only the archaic pronouns and verb inflections — what Melville calls "the stately dramatic thee and thou of the Quaker idiom" — that gives the dialogue a Shakespearean ring. Melville uses "Macbeth" and "King Lear" in his construction of Ahab and in the play's treatment of man versus fate.
        I find the play more reminiscent of opera, and not just because the sailors sing sea shanties in elegant a cappella harmony, but because its scale relates to opera. The play's extended speeches resemble arias and duets. Mother Road provides another fascinating entertainment.
       

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