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Buntport captures the whale
By Adam Goldstein
goldstea@mscd.edu

Photo courtesy of Buntport Theater Company From left: Erin Rollman, Erik Edborg, Brian Colona and Hannah Duggan star in the Buntport Theater Company’s original production Moby Dick Unread, based on Herman Melville’s classic novel.

The cramped stage is sopping wet. What started as mere puddles on the concrete floor has grown into pools that stretch the length of the theater’s 15-by-20-foot stage. The plain white walls are still stained with the water that has been flung in every direction during the performance. As four actors step from behind the red velvet curtains to take their final bows, their drenched costumes and soaked hair reveal that they have not been exempt from the waterworks.

It makes sense that the members of the Buntport Theater Company seemed a bit exhausted at the end of the second performance of their new play, Moby Dick Unread. During the show, each actor had been repeatedly drenched in water drawn from buckets, a watering can, a fish tank and, for one troupe member, a rubber squirter strategically placed in his long johns.

Their more impressive feat, however, lies in the fact that they have just managed to squeeze an epic milestone of American literature into a 90-minute stage play.

“The book, Moby Dick, is very postmodern in its writing,” said Samantha Schmitz, one of the Buntport’s production technicians. “Herman Melville goes from dialogue to monologue, from lists of whaling supplies to poems to verses to everything in between. ... We’re trying to bring the whole book to the stage.”

For anyone familiar with the Buntport’s past dramatic outings, their onstage venture into the world of 19th-century whaling ships seems to fit right in. In its past productions, this Denver troupe has tackled Franz Kafka’s surreal short story, “The Metamorphosis” with ice skates and has lightened William Shakespeare’s bloodiest tragedy, Titus Andronicus, with an upbeat Broadway soundtrack.

Even with their well-established track record for melding the highfalutin and the slapstick, Melville’s 1851 opus posed its own unique challenges.

“A lot of things have more of a straight narrative than this. You know half of the book is lists of whaling supplies and what whalers do,” said Erik Edborg, a Buntport cast member who plays several parts in the stage show.

“Melville has a lot of weird misspellings,” said Hannah Duggan, another member of the company. “He messes up sayings all the time, but that’s just the way he wrote it. He just wrote whatever he wanted – it seemed like he didn’t have an editor.”

To translate Melville’s 700-plus pages into a more tactile forum, the members have relied on their strengths: creative stage design, innovative prop work and their innate onstage chemistry. The play’s dizzying scope is matched only by its inventiveness.

A sanded rowboat salvaged from Cherry Creek dam stands as the Pequod, while a set of ropes in the rear of stage left represents the whaling ship’s lookout perch. A brown stocking symbolizes Ahab’s wooden leg. A series of eight water buckets strategically hung from the ceiling, along with a water can, provide all the necessary liquid to viscerally recreate the stormy and sodden atmosphere of the high seas. As for the great white whale itself, the cast makes use of rubber toys, chalk illustrations and tapestries to create the illusion of Ahab’s great oceanic foe.

“We were trying to bring the whole book to the stage, and it was hard,” Schmitz said. “I mean, we didn’t even get to put a whole whale on the stage.”

No, but the Buntport troupe did manage to include many of Melville’s diverse narrative threads – the supply lists, the jargon, the lessons on whale anatomy and the careful accounting of a ship’s culinary budget.

To string together these disparate parts, the four actors use their engaging brand of self-deprecating humor to retain the audience’s attention and credulity.

The cast’s familiar refrain throughout the play eloquently points to the impossibility of fully realizing the task at hand: “We’re making do!”

But somehow, impossible as it may seem, they more than make do. Through creative props, pithy dialogue and many a bucket of water, the four players manage to bring Melville to life in a new way. In fact, they seem to make this dense literary classic their own.

“It jumps around stylistically so much that I think it really lends itself to the stage,” Edborg said. “Every scene is like a new play in itself.”

Moby Dick Unread will run at the Buntport Theater, 717 Lipan St., through April 26. For more information, call (720) 946-1388.