MOBY DICK @ South Coast Repertory

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is a novel everyone knows and almost no-one you know has read. But that doesn’t stop us from thinking we know what it’s about: obsession. Captain Ahab wants to get that big white whale to whom he lost a leg; but literature’s most famous albino cetacean stands in for pretty much whatever you want too much and how such desire can be your undoing. It’s a powerful theme, but for many Herman Melville’s extensive anatomical discourses and sundry other digressions do not help that theme strike home.

Enter Lookingglass Theatre Company, who distill Moby Dick to its dramatic and thematic essence, delivering the goods with about as much minimalist splendor as you’ll find anywhere in this watery world.

Call him Ishmael (Jamie Abelson), a malcontented, penniless young man who signs on for a three-year whaling expedition aboard the Pequod with his new friend Queequeg (Anthony Fleming III). They are long at sea before they actually meet Ahab (Christopher Donahue) and come to know of their captain’s single-minded purpose.

Just as the action of Moby-Dick is but the skeleton of the fleshy leviathan that is Melville’s magnum opus, director David Catlin adapts its text as framework for erecting a gentle spectacle of mood and movement. Bathed in William C. Kirkham’s impressive lighting, his nimble cast glides not only all over the stage but also above it, taking full advantage of the Isaac Schoepp’s rigging and Courtney O’Neill’s high-curving spars that suggest ribs of the biggest beasts of the deep. As with all of the best movement elements found in plays, none of Sylvia Hernandez-DiStasi’s beautiful aerial and acrobatic choreography is self-serving; rather, it always augments the textual action and emotion, functioning as an organic part of theatrical whole.

The cast is fine from top to bottom. The closest thing to a complaint I can come up with is that perhaps Abelson sounds like he’s at the final stage of a table-reading, nailing his lines perfectly but leaving a little room to loosen up onstage. Fleming’s Queequeg is always dignified and funny (his entrance scene is the play’s one bit of hilarity); Donahue conjures Ahab with the proper proportions of callous, oblivious obsession and buried humanity; and with only a few lines to do the job, Walter Owen Briggs effectively communicates Starbuck’s pragmatism and compassion.

Perhaps the production’s most beguiling element is the trio of Kelley Abell, Cordelia Dewdney, and Kasey Foster, who by turns embody (in addition to a few minor characters) fate, lightning, and the sea itself. Their moody vocal intonations—and even a bit of foley—provide the show’s most arresting audio, while the only reason their hoop-skirted gliding at the beginning of Act Two is not clearly the most beautiful onstage image is because Catlin and company give us so many other worthy candidates, including a parachute dress of an ocean so gorgeous that we’re delighted to see it twice.

Two particularly affecting moments come when the trio go to work as whales. Catlin (with a major assist from costume designer Sully Ratke) has come up with clever ways to both humanize the Pequod‘s more mundane prey (the slaughter and subsequent rendering of a non-eponymous whale is especially poignant, playing upon how today’s Westerners generally regard whales as too close to human to be hunted) and present the fearsomeness of Ahab’s ultimate target.

The show’s only real misfires come in regard to the trio. While most of their vocalizing is live, during a couple of scenes Catlin has opted for piping in pre-recorded tracks, which both breaks with the methodology of the rest of the show and compromises the atmosphere, as the pre-recorded tracks are louder than the trio’s live vocals. The other misfires come during the climactic confrontation with the big Dick himself. The orchestration of this scene, including its choreography and lighting, are so breathtaking that a couple of short stretches that just lie there may have simply been missed lighting cues at this particular performance, standing out all the more because the show in general—and the majority of this scene in particular—is so technically spot-on.

Deserving of special mention is the production’s pacing. Moby Dick has not a few lyrical and poetic passages, with transitions that instantaneously shift gears from meditative to high action. Catlin conceives the show’s macro-movement to perfection, and his cast seems to enact the microcosmic angular changes of speed and direction as if it’s the most natural flow in the world.

Many novels readily offer themselves up for visual adaptation; Moby-Dick isn’t one of them. Nonetheless, Lookingglass Theatre Company manages to deliver the broad strokes of the plot and spirit of Melville’s masterpiece while translating many of its most evocative moments into visual language that communicates with articulateness worthy of the finest prose. It was a perilous quest they undertook, but with this crew the audience is in safe, beautiful waters.

MOBY DICK THE LOOKINGGLASS THEATRE COMPANY @ SOUTH COAST REPERTORY • SEGERSTROM STAGE: 655 TOWN CENTER DR • COSTA MESA 92626 • 714.708.5555 SCR.ORG • SUN/TUES/WED 7:30PM, THURS-SAT 8PM + SAT-SUN 2:30PM • $10-$79 • THROUGH FEBRUARY 19

(Photo credit: Liz Lauren)