Even if you only got as far as the Cliff's Notes or the 1956 Moby Dick film, you know that Herman Melville's place in western art rests on his tale of a sea captain crippled by a whale, who vows vengeance thereon, aided by his culturally-diverse crew whose loyalty will seal their own doom as well. Playgoers embarking upon the yarn in its entirety, however, are aware that it is a lengthy narrative—not simply for the long passages of factual whaling lore deemed necessary by its author, but by the array of motifs drawn from classical myth embedded within its odyssey.
Take, for example, the Reverend Mapple's 20-minute sermon on the Biblical story of Jonah that serves as a pre-curtain prologue as we settle into place for this zoom broadcast, or the mid-ocean meetings with several other ships bearing injuries from their encounters with the creatures of the briny deep and admonitions to Captain Ahab on the folly of his quest. Consider, too, the inclusion among the seafarers of a devout Protestant, a cheerful secularist, an innocent youth, and a pagan clairvoyant—all of whom have their say before our ship closes with its nemesis for the duel-to-the-death.
This is a lot of literary baggage (at one point even our narrator Ishmael asks himself whether his tale might be an "intolerable allegory") to be hefted by only four voices coming to us in real time, scrubbed of regional accents from locations ranging as widely as New Orleans and Vancouver, within an environment requiring total absence of extraneous sensory distraction in order to achieve maximum aural concentration.
So if Bradberry and his cast sometimes seem to be—well, treading water at the midpoint of the two-hour-plus running time—did I mention the barely-discernable iambic pentameter? And Nick Montopoli's well-researched maritime soundscape?—they are to be commended for never allowing their Salty-Jack-Tars to veer into Robert Newton-camp, but instead helm their cumbersome text to a final showdown as thrilling as a Spielberg epic.
