Lookingglass MOBY DICK invites us to look within
When it comes right down to it, the business of theatre is not so very different from the old fashioned business of whaling. Those called to the theatre, like those called to the sea, rely on keen vision, robust physicality, great resilience, and palpable instinct. They eschew the safety of the shore to pursue something elusive, leviathan, and vital: in the case of the seamen—a whale, perhaps a whale as fearsome as literature’s great white Moby Dick; in the case of the theatre company—a play, perhaps a play as inspired as Lookingglass’s adaptation of Moby Dick, which returns home from a national tour for a second residence on Michigan Avenue.
Produced in association with The Actors Gymnasium, Lookingglass Theatre Company’s Moby Dick is full of astonishing acrobatics. Adaptor/director David Catlin performs the most impressive balancing act of all. He both distills Herman Melville’s vast, digressive novel to its narrative core and preserves much of the epic’s rich characterization, symbolism, and philosophy.
Simply, Moby Dick is the story of Captain Ahab of the whaling ship Pequod. Seeking revenge for the loss of his leg, he chases the great, white sperm whale Moby Dick across the Pacific to an inevitable deadly confrontation. Lookingglass tells the tale well, with powerful performances, inventive design, and insistent theatricality. But this production does more. It invites the audience to take ownership of the myth and evaluate, through the lens of our own sympathies and experiences, what exactly it means to chase a great, white whale.
The emotional core of the play is the tension between Nathan Hosner’s stately, charismatic Captain Ahab and his pragmatic first mate Starbuck (played with grim-faced gravitas by Kareem Bandealy). In act one, Ahab seduces the crew and the audience with his idealism and commitment to the higher purpose of hunting Moby Dick. Starbuck’s competing desire to collect barrels of valuable whale oil seems small and commercial in comparison. But as Ahab’s hubris drives him towards madness and the Pequod towards ruin, our loyalties mutiny. Starbuck has ideals too. He cares like a father for the men of the ship, and he dreams of returning home to his wife and young son in Nantucket. Bandealy’s performance is a touching, nuanced portrait of a man torn between love and duty.
Ahab and Starbuck represent two different workplace personalities: the passion-driven leader who defines himself through professional purpose versus the highly competent worker who’s mostly in it to make enough money to provide for his family and enjoy his vacation time. But they represent more than that too, of course. Their conflict reads as an existential parable. Moby Dick is their touchstone for examining human purpose and values.
The audience feels the thrill and danger of whaling when the actors perform daring circus feats in sequences like the lowering of the whaling boats and the typhoon. Micah Figueroa, Javen Ulambayar, and Anthony Fleming III (in a standout performance as Queequeg) dazzle in particular. In these physical sequences, the actors work in chorus, not unison, punctuating the same rhythm with dissonant gestures and attitudes. Sylvia Hernandez-DiStasi’s choreography, expertly performed, reveals the characters’ distinct personalities and motives, placing each somewhere on the spectrum from Ahab to Starbuck. One young man is there to prove himself, another because he has nowhere else to go, one for adventure, one out of habit, one out of loyalty. These differences color what, exactly, each character is hunting in Moby Dick.
The audience is not excluded from the emotional stocktaking. “Come, come hither, ye broken and broken-hearted,” sings a chorus of three Fates, calling the narrator Ishmael, the crew of the Pequod, and the audience to begin their voyage. By repeatedly referring to all the human inhabitants of the theatre as the “broken and broken-hearted,” the Fates challenge us all to weigh our successes against our disappointments, our ambitions against our failures, our loves against our losses. Like Ahab, what will we die for? Like Starbuck, what are we living for? In short, what is our own Moby Dick?
Catlin’s major narrative innovation is his inclusion of the three classical Fates, played by Kelley Abell, Cordelia Dewdney, and Mattie Hawkinson. With breath, harmonic singing, and onstage instrumentation, they create much of the play’s aural landscape. They also play various characters and nonhuman entities— Starbuck’s wife, a Nantucket prophet, whales, and the sea itself, to name a few. I was left wondering what the omnipresence of the Fates suggests philosophically. Does fate originate without or within? Does Fate set Ahab in motion, or does Ahab set his fate in motion? Sometimes Fate visits you like the sea, an impartial, elemental force that you cannot control. But sometimes, Catlin implies, we are in conversation with our Fate; it is inescapable only insofar as it is an expression of our own personalities, relationships, and choices.
There’s still more to be gleaned here thematically. Melville's novel explores the difficulty and individuality of visual interpretation. In keeping with his theme, the design team crafts symbolic elements that can take on different meaning in different contexts. Scenic designer Courtney O’Neill flanks the stage with metallic poles that resemble a whale’s rib bones. They function as both ship masts and circus poles, and elegantly locate us in the belly of the beast, onboard the Pequod, and in a theatre, all at once.
Sully Ratke’s costume design also is layered. For example, the Fates’ dripping eyeliner and black lipstick signal, in one scene, a whale’s carnivorous blood-thirst. But in the next, the same makeup markings look pitiful, like the spewed lifeblood of a gentle mother whale. This juxtaposition of woman as villain and woman as victim got me thinking, by extension, about how little agency and complexity are afforded women by a vengeful and patriarchal society that casts them in every role but protagonist.
When Ahab’s Moby Dick (in the form of the Fates) finally arrives at the end of the third act, the audience is quite literally enveloped in the storytelling. I won’t tell you how, but it’s a meta-theatrical climax to a stunning play.
In the five years I have lived in Chicago, there have been as many distinct adaptations of Moby Dick: Catlin’s at Lookingglass, an acclaimed production by Blake Montgomery & The Building Stage, multiple captivating puppet plays by Blair Thomas & Company, the Chicago Mammals’ All Girl Moby Dick, and a parody imbedded within The House Theatre’s Season on the Line. That strikes me as a remarkable number of Moby Dicks! It is possible that this preoccupation is symptomatic of a scene too deep in conversation with itself, but I believe it reveals something about Chicago’s theatrical ethos.
If Chicago theatre makers feel a particular affinity to whalers, it is because they understand the crucial value of process, of allowing oneself to be at sea. Chicago remains a maker scene, a bastion of new and devised work, from its tiny and intensely DIY storefronts all the way up to its Tony-award-winning Equity houses. That Chicago casts a novel of Moby Dick’s immense profundity as its great white whale reflects the great ambition, hubris, and humanity of its theatrical spirit.
I’m leaving this Chicago theatre scene that I admire to pursue a doctorate in NYC. As I set sail, again, I thank my Chicago crew of strange bedfellows turned bosom best friends for the rescues at sea, for the strong draughts (read: Malort) quaffed to strengthen the communal bond, and for all the adventures. It’s been a whale of a time.