'A Curtain Up' Berkshires Review
Moby Dick Rehearsed

Herman Melville enthusiasts -- and there are many in these parts where Melville's home is a favorite tourist attraction -- will want to see what Orson Welles himself a man of Ahab-like megalomania has wrought with that most famous tale, Moby Dick. Those who enjoy having their literature dished up to them in easy to digest dramatic adaptations will also find much to enjoy in this hybrid of Melville's story adapted to draw a parallel between King Lear and Captain Ahab. In fact, this new version of Orson Welles' forty-five-year-old play-within-a play sounds so intriguing that one wonders why it is so little known and even less often performed -- a troupe of actors abandon their rehearsal of a play about one unforgiving, vengeance obsessed man, King Lear, to recreate another of the same emotional stripe, Captain Ahab.

Eric Hill's beautiful, moody production has all the elements to support the Berkshire Theatre Festival's dusting the mothballs off Moby Dick - Rehearsed. He has commandeered the large cast into an impressive ensemble that presents us with many stunning human tableaus of the prideful Ahab and the men he persuades to stick with him as he pursues his unforgiving quest for revenge against the monster whale that took his leg. These tableaus of men whose acting is more a case of "physicalized listening" is more potent than much of the blank verse in which Welles wrote his script to underscore the Melville-Shakespeare connection. (The quoted term comes from Brendan Coyle who should know, since this actorly listening garnered him an Olivier Award for best supporting player in The Weir in which he is currently playing on Broadway. Groups of silent but eminently watchable actors also contributed to the excitement of the just closed revival of The Iceman Cometh).

To support all the elements of the play -- the scenes leading into silent as well as versified and sung (chanties courtesy of BTF composer Scott Killian) Moby Dick story -- Mr. Hill has enlisted the Berkshire Theatre's designer-par-excellence of dark and moody sets, Rob Odorisio; also Don Kotlowitz to light everything in the right shades of gloom.

That's the good news. On the minus side, David Purdham is a capable and courageous actor. Orson Welles who played Ahab when this play opened in London, saved himself for Father Mapple in John Huston's memorable Moby Dick film in which Gregory Peck played Ahab. Purdham here walks the plank as Ahab and ascends the preacher's lectern as Father Mapple. But Purdham's Ahab, while okay, hardly has what London critic Kenneth Tynan called "a voice of bottled thunder." Neither is his Captain Mapple's Johnah sermon a match to the multi-talented Welles'.

While the non-speaking scenes represent the best part of this production, the whole cast does well by the speaking parts. Casey Biggs is a strong Starbuck (Ahab's first mate) and Tom Story outstanding as the narrator and only survivor, Ishmael. I was particularly struck by his strong physical resemblance to a young Orson Welles.

In the final analysis, you come away more impressed by the production than the play. For the true horror and tragedy of Ahab and a full sense of his universality and the book's symbolism, you'll still need to read the book.

To close on a note of trivia: The name of Melville's most famous creation was suggested by an article by Jeremiah Reynolds, published in the New York Knickerbocker Magazine in May 1839. "Mocha Dick: or The White Whale of the Pacific" recounted the capture of a giant white sperm whale that had become infamous among whalers for its violent attacks on ships and their crews. The meaning of the name itself is quite simple -- the whale was often sighted in the vicinity of the island of Mocha, and "Dick" was merely a generic name like "Jack" or "Tom" -- names of other deadly whales cited by Melville in Chapter 45 of the novel.