The White Whale Journal at Theaterlab

After the tragic death of his brother, a writer inherits a strange archive: journals of daily life, each tagged with a sticker—pig, plum blossom, small talismans of attention. All are accounted for save one: The White Whale Journal. Drawn into the undertow of his brother’s words, the performer goes hunting—for what was withheld, erased, or too heavy to name. He builds a ritual from fragments and margins, chasing the meaning of blank pages and deliberate gaps. The play refuses quiet reverence, circling instead the cultural silence around suicide and the lack of rituals to hold it. In tracking what’s missing, the narrator resists a neat ending, choosing obsession over closure, pursuit over resignation. What emerges is not an answer, but a widening: a brother restored not as a final act, but as a vast, unfinished human story still breaching the surface.

Hotel New Work provides collaboratively-driven companies in the midst of creating ambitious new work with 40 hours of rehearsal time and one work-in-progress showing with feedback.

Theaterlab is happy to provide room keys to Arturo Luíz Soria and Danilo Gambini, as they develop The White Whale Journal.