The trifecta of Herman Melville, Orson Welles, and Theatricum Botanicum can’t help but be a winner. The talents of all three are on display in the rustic amphitheater which since 1973 has been home for the Geer family’s Theatricum Botanicum acting company, where a production of Welles’s gripping adaptation of Moby Dick has just opened for a summer-long run.> Welles frames his adaptation in a clever way. When the lights come up we meet an acting company waiting to rehearse King Lear, only to be that it will be scrapped in favor of a last-minute substitution of Moby Dick. This requires frantic work on the part of the director (Franc Ross), who must not only cast the play on the spot but begin immediate rehearsals. Once that happens, the director (who also plays Mapple) steps aside and allows the adaptation to gather steam—make that wind--and drive swiftly toward its dark, tumultuous end. A thirteen-person cast plus a six-person ensemble fills TB’s wide, wooden-planked stage, which mostly serves as the deck of the Pequod while at sea, with a few preliminary scenes taking place on shore in Nantucket before the voyage begins. The large multi-racial cast, led by Gerald Rivers as Ahab, Colin Simon as Starbuck, KiDane Kelati as Pip, and Dane Oliver as Ishmael, does outstanding work, handling Melville’s beautiful and highly poetic language with impressive ease and skill. Another major character in the book, Queequeg (Michael McFall), makes himself felt in the early scenes of Welles’s adaptation, but gets lost in a crowd later on. Welles chooses to keep the Ahab/Starbuck feud in the forefront, with the latter as first mate trying to reason with Captain Ahab and keep him from endangering everyone aboard the Pequod with his demented need to track down and kill the great white whale. The humanity of the crew also finds expression in the cabin-boy Pip whose plight—a mental illness—briefly touches Ahab’s heart, only to be trumped when the whale breaches, and all he can think of is vengeance and murder. The true director of Moby Dick—Rehearsed, Ellen Geer, does wonders with the operatic sweep of Melville’s story; in this she is aided by fight choreographer Dane Oliver and by Marshall McDaniel’s sound design and original music. Never has a typhoon at sea and a life-and-death battle between man and beast sounded so terrifyingly dramatic and real.
