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[skygiants]

genarti and I went with a friend to see Plexus Polaire's Moby Dick on tour today, ft. "seven actors, fifty puppets, video-projections, a drowned orchestra and a whale-sized whale," (to quote the press copy) and now I have been sitting here for several hours trying to figure out how to express how incredibly effective this was as an adaptation.

Not just the orchestra but the whole set is drowned, is the first thing. The whole design of the stage, visual and sound, is constructed in such a way as to give you the sense that you and the cast are underwater the entire time; "everyone in the boat was drowned from the start," I said, as we walked back, and genarti said, "you think your boat is the whole world that matters and it's just one tiny mote in the world you're actually in."

The second thing is that of course everyone is puppets -- everyone except Ishmael, who is introduced as a human actor delivering a condensed (and less manic) (and even more depressed) (but still quite funny) (though we were the only ones laughing and the guy next to us gave us a very severe look) (does he not understand that it's supposed to be funny?!) version of his opening monologue. But there is an Ishmael puppet, who appears after Ishmael and the other sailors take the oath with Ahab, and the Ishmael puppet is on the ship moving among the other puppets, dynamic, part of the narrative, while the human Ishmael stands quite still as an outsider -- our friend made this point about the movement, which I hadn't caught because I was too busy marveling at the fact that they literally did "Muppet Moby Dick and Ishmael is the only human" and it was haunting and immersive and thematically compelling?! Because the puppetry is of course part of the point. When puppet!Ahab is getting strapped into his lines, and the puppeteers seem caring or sycophantic, and then suddenly it's a trap and a threat and puppet Ahab looks at them and sees them and is clearly raging about it -- that is, in fact, what Moby Dick is about.

But of course Moby Dick is also about whales and whaling and the whaling industry and the show does not forget it nor does it let the audience forget it. The first whaling sequence features two relatively whale puppets, a mother and calf. These are not the whale-sized whales promised in the cover copy; those will show up later. These little hand-sized whale puppets on stage for about three minutes and those three minutes are perhaps the most brutal and devastating in the show.

(ME, LATER: and also when all the little puppets from the Pequod are drowning in the vastness of the ocean, that is also so effective! you really see the horror of it!
genarti: I mean, sure, I guess ... but I have to admit I was mostly rooting for Moby Dick because a big part of me was still thinking about that mother and calf whale puppet ...
ME: well, sure, you can root for Moby Dick and still feel sad for the crew of the Pequod all drowning alone in the vastness of the ocean!
genarti: I guess)

It's a quick ninety-minute show, so it is sort of a highlights reel, but a highlights reel that is deeply targeted for maximum impact. There's no Queequeg-Ishmael marriage at the beginning, and for a moment I seriously wondered if everything was going to be condensed down to Ishmael and Ahab, but instead you get a series of mostly silent romantic scenes between puppet!Ishmael and puppet!Queequeg about which Ishmael-the-human-actor speaks very little -- when he did finally say, "He was my [significant pause] brother," there was a ripple of laughter around the theater, and I wondered if that was because everyone had picked up on the context, or if that was just the Moby Dick fans who were aware that Queequeg and Ishmael were in fact already married. Pip is also there, in a preview of what it means to be drowning in the vastness of the ocean, and Starbuck, a little, though I missed a lot of the Starbuck-Ahab dialogue. I also missed the Rachel which does not get a look-in. Fedallah is there but only as Ahab's puppeteers, a collection of black-clad and black-turbaned figures in skull makeup who are never introduced as part of the world of the Pequod. In general this show chooses to engage with the problems with race in the text by simply not engaging, and Fedallah is the most pointed example of that. I'm not entirely sure this is a success, but then, I'm not sure Dave Molloy's method of staring Moby Dick's Race Problems directly in the face works either.

Before I saw the show, I was thinking to myself, 'I'm very glad I've read Moby Dick but also it would have been very funny to base my entire sense of Moby Dick off the Dave Malloy show and the Plexus Polaire puppet show.' But now I can't think this because I have no idea if this show would have hit at all if I hadn't gone in already knowing some of the themes -- the way it's working with the text is brilliant if you know what you're looking at and I truly don't know if it makes any sense if you don't -- and I would have been so deeply sorry to miss the experience of it hitting right, which the vast majority off it really and truly did! Love to be emotionally compromised by whale puppetry!

Anyway. Unfortunately I cannot tell everyone to go see it because I don't know where or when it will be next; we all desperately wished afterwards that there was a recorded copy we could start foisting on people but instead I will just drop the trailer which at least conveys the sense of underwater haunting.

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