A big new play weighs in at Marin Theatre
The second offering of Marin Theatre’s 2014-15 season focuses on a father’s attempt to reconnect with his daughter. Two problems: the father is a 600-pound gay man, and the daughter hates everyone.
Dad is number one on her hit list. She likes to call him “disgusting.”
Dad, Charlie, is metaphorically as big as a whale (he’s pushing 600 pounds), and that’s the title of Samuel D. Hunter’s startling The Whale, which happens also to be the subtitle of Herman Melville’s masterpiece, Moby Dick. In Hunter’s play we find ourselves aboard a cluttered apartment in a small Idaho town. Like Captain Ahab’s Pequod, that apartment is racked by various storms, mostly psychic, over which Charlie’s imminent death hovers.
Can Dad save his daughter before his enormous bulk gasps its last and sinks out of sight?
We meet the alarmingly fat Charlie plunked on his living room sofa in front of a laptop on which he’s conducting an online college writing seminar. Just getting to the bathroom is a struggle, and he hasn’t been out of his apartment in years, so this is how he earns a living. He asks students to revise, revise, revise, but slowly, in encounters with his daughter and others, he comes to believe he’s really asking them to purge their work of raw truth. Isn’t it better to go with what’s real?
The play’s short few days, which we experience during a streamlined two hours of theater, focus on a crisis point in his life: its end (the consequences of his weight are about to finish him off) and the arrival of three significant people at his door: an earnest 19-year-old Mormon missionary named Elder Thomas who may not be what he seems; his raw ex-wife, Mary, who is just what she seems; and his mouthy, raging teen-aged daughter, Ellie, who has no friends because of her searing honesty. She alienates everyone by spewing just what she thinks and feels. A fourth passenger on the wreck of Charlie’s life is his friend, Liz, who loves and cares for him and who turns out to have an unexpected connection to his gay past.
Hunter’s play has much to recommend it–a seething dark humor and plenty of juice–and Marin Theatre’s take on it, deftly orchestrated by director Jasson Minidakis, is irresistible. If you think a lonely fat guy’s end-of-life travails can’t be riveting, think again. Minidakis is expertly abetted by Michael Lockner (set), Kurt Landisman (lighting) and Chris Houston (sound). Special praise must go Christine Crook, who, aided by CMC & Design, devised Charlie’s blubbery costume, and to Charlie’s breath and physicality coach, Vicki Shaghoian.
Of course it’s not Charlie who wears the costume and gets coached, it’s the remarkable actor, Nicholas Pelczar, who embodies him. I’ve long admired Pelczar since he became a fixture of Bay Area theater a few years back, but he’s spent too much time at the edge rather than at the heart of the plays he’s been in. Here he’s front and center, in a role that would try the finest actors, and he’s stunningly convincing. He doesn’t make a false move as he drags himself about with gasping breaths–you believe completely in him–though what he does goes beyond realism; he transmutes it into wrenching poetry.
The supporting cast backs him up handsomely: Liz Sklar as his hurting, loyal friend, Liz; Adam Magill as the touchingly eager Elder Thomas; Michell Maxson as tough, struggling Mary; and Cristina Oeschger as the seething daughter, Ellie. Oeschger gives an electric jolt to every scene she’s in.
Hunter’s play has a flaw. He insists too strongly on his themes and on the Moby Dick parallels; he spells them out for us rather than letting us come to them ourselves. At the climax you feel him pulling the threads together, striving for symmetry, and the drama thins, loses weight. I’m not opposed to well-made plays, but not everyone is an Ibsen. Nonetheless I was gripped by The Whale. It’s must-see theater. When Hunter is at his best, writing the crackling, funny/alarming scenes of confrontation that power this work, he’s as good as they come.
The Whale plays in Mill Valley until October 26th, followed by The Complete History of Comedy, Abridged. For tickets/information call 415-388-5208 or visit www.marintheatre.org.
–ROBERT HALL