Review: MOBY DICK at Southwest Shakespeare Company
The production runs through April 4th at the Mesa Arts Center in Mesa, AZ.
Guest contributor David Appleford captures the essence of Southwest Shakespeare Company’s production of MOBY DICK, directed by Lee Cooley.
When a novel as vast and unruly as MOBY DICK drifts onto the stage, you expect compromise. What you don’t expect is how liberating that compromise can be. Mark Rosenwinkel’s adaptation doesn’t try to haul Melville’s leviathan aboard intact. Instead, it trims the story to the bone, trusting the audience’s imagination to supply the sea around it.
The surprise in this Southwest Shakespeare Company production is how theatrical the result can feel. Now playing at the Mesa Arts Center until April 4, Rosenwinkel’s script reduces the sprawling narrative to a lean storytelling engine, told in just over seventy-five minutes, then oddly stretched with an unnecessary intermission.
The novel is pared down to the core of a sea tale. A restless young wanderer named Ishmael (Braden Wahl) signs aboard the whaling ship Pequod in search of adventure, joining a crew that includes the easygoing, guitar strumming first mate Stubb (Tom Mangum) and the mysterious Queequeg (Justin Hosten), a tattooed Polynesian harpooner rumored to be the son of a cannibal king. Presiding over them all is the ship’s captain, Ahab (the company’s Artistic Director, Keath Hall), whose presence hangs over the voyage like a storm cloud.
As the Pequod sails into uncharted waters, the crew discovers this is no ordinary whaling expedition. Ahab has a single, consuming purpose: to hunt down Moby Dick, the legendary white whale that once tore away his leg.
Rosenwinkel’s stage adaptation began in 1991 as a commission for the Idaho Theatre for Youth. It has since traveled far beyond its original harbor, circling North America and even surfacing in Rostov, Russia. What sounds, at first, like an educational exercise reveals itself to be something far more ambitious: it’s ‘youth theatre’ only in origin. And while the play has enjoyed a long life in educational and minimalist productions, Southwest Shakespeare Company’s current staging at Mesa Arts Center, shaped and refined by director Lee Cooley, places it firmly in the realm of theater for adult audiences.
The story is imaginatively told by a handful of actors performed on the forum of Mesa’s Farnsworth Studio Theatre, trading scale for intimacy. As the actors transform themselves into character, suddenly the deck of the Pequod seems to rise beneath their feet. Theatrically, Ahab becomes less a character than a gravitational force, pulling every soul aboard the Pequod into his orbit. His obsession is no longer simple revenge but something closer to an argument with fate itself. Opposite him stands Ishmael, the watcher – curious, reflective, trying to make sense of the strange fellowship around him.
This stripped-down approach turns Melville’s epic into something oddly intimate. With only a basic though effective set design of a sailing ship by Tianna Torrilhon, Stacey Walston’s ever changing lighting and Jacob Nichols’ sound design depicting a ship’s bell, seagulls, sea spray, and the haunting calls of distant whales, the imagination conjured in the minds of the audience supplies the waves, the wind, and the terrible white whale itself. And that imaginative collaboration between actor and audience is where the production often finds itself. The play becomes less about reproducing the novel and more about evoking the command of obsession that runs through it. Only in its brief miscalculated use of puppetry does the production’s illusion falter, a moment that, like the rest of the play, would have been stronger if left to suggestion.
In stripping away Melville’s famous digressions, Rosenwinkel doesn’t diminish the novel so much as distill it, leaving behind the essential tension between observation and obsession, between a man who seeks to understand the world and one determined to conquer it. However, those narrative edits are the one place where admirers of the novel may feel a slight pang. The original MOBY DICK thrives on its wandering mind. Melville interrupts his story to meditate on whales, religion, madness, and the slippery nature of truth. On stage, such digressions would stall the voyage, so Rosenwinkel wisely steers around them. It’s the spine of the narrative that remains: the ship, the crew, and the gathering storm of Ahab’s purpose.
What emerges from this approach is a kind of theatrical sea shanty; it’s lean, has rhythm, and is propelled by storytelling rather than spectacle. The piece works best when it embraces its own simplicity, letting the audience see the machinery of performance up close while still believing in the voyage. As a result, Rosenwinkel successfully illustrates how theatre thrives on suggestion, and here at the Mesa Arts Center it succeeds because of the energy with which the four accomplished Southwest Shakespeare Company performers effectively conjure Melville’s world.
The novel famously asks readers to confront the vastness of the universe and humanity’s stubborn urge to challenge it. Director Cooley’s presentation doesn’t attempt to replace Melville’s novel; it approaches the question the novel asks from a different angle. Backed by a narrator’s descriptive voice and the steady atmospheric sounds of the world surrounding the Pequod, the production invites us to imagine it, much like an audiobook or a radio play inspiring a theater of the mind.
In that modest theatrical space, with four actors on a generally bare deck, and a whale that exists in our imagination, the old story of compulsion and the sea finds a fresh, unexpectedly playful life. Yet somehow it still feels large enough to suggest an ocean beyond the stage while pulling the audience close enough to feel the salt spray of Ahab’s obsession.
Southwest Shakespeare Company -- https://www.swshakespeare.org/
Venue: Mesa Arts Center -- 1 E Main St, Mesa, AZ -- (480) 435-6868
Photo credit to Stacey Walton: 1—Keath Hall. 2 – L to R: Braden Wahl, Tom Mangum, Justin Hosten
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