My head is spinning between Oscar nominations– an exceptional batch of movies this year–and theater which stretches the boundaries. Though it’s only here til Sunday– I loved it so much I couldn’t resist writing about it! Read on…
MUST SEE: MOBY DICK— with puppets!! Wait, what? This production is a marvel, somewhere between stagecraft and witchcraft!! In a mere 85 minutes, this theater troupe out of Norway takes Melville’s haunting tale of Captain Ahab’s obsessive hunt for the the big white whale who bit off his leg, to the ends of the earth and into the magical realm of theater which blurs the boundaries between the real and the fantastic. This whale of a tale swirls around an infinite vortex of interpretations about life, death, and the search for justice and meaning in a potentially random universe. This troupe bites off even more for us to chew on and lets it reverberate: video projections suggesting shimmering sea life in an endless ocean, onstage musicians, and puppets whose operators seem only subliminally apparent (are we all at the mercy of some entity pulling the strings?).
The thing is, I didn’t immediately realize I was looking at a puppet when a haunted Captain Ahab first appears. He was somehow alive! NO suspension of disbelief necessary–only the puppet and my own sense of reality were suspended in the ocean of director Yngvild Aspeli’s imagination. As I gazed at this loose-limbed pile of paint and wood manipulated and voiced by hidden hooded figures, had I just witnessed the intersection of life and death? That’s what I call theater. This extraordinary theater troupe, Plexus Polaire, created a miracle of a production involving an enormous whale, fifty puppets, “drowned” musicians, and seven actors emerging from the cavity of a whaling ship that looked like a whale’s rib cage–who’s devouring whom?
The ocean and the whale are the tip of the iceberg– the collision of the tale and the implications spawned by this production about what drives us onward, and who we are in a sea of conscious and unconscious desires swirled me into a maelstrom of thought and feeling which continues to ripple…
Onstage at Emerson Paramount Center only until SUNDAY January 28th!
