When David Catlin’s bold, captivating version of Moby-Dick debuted at Lookingglass Theatre in 2015, it was praised by then Reader critic Zac Thompson as a “dazzling” spectacle. After its wildly successful local run came a national tour. Now the production’s back in Chicago, in all its acrobatic glory, and having seen it twice, I can safely say that for sheer visual splendor, breathtaking design, and epic storytelling, there’s nothing to rival it now or in recent memory.
The sea, for Melville, was masculine: sharks, whales, and swordfish, he says, are “the strong, troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea.” Not so here. The sea, and even eventually the whale, is represented by a trio of Fates (Kelly Abell, Mattie Hawkinson, and Cordelia Dawdney), who weave their way ominously through scenes, singing ethereally and generally evoking an ever-present, oceanic, female counterpoint to the male energies of the hunt. Twice during the play, in one of the production’s most arresting images, the sea billows out over the entire stage in the form of a Fate’s massively unfurled blue skirt (the costume design is by Sully Ratke). When a harpooner named Mungun (Javen Ulambayar) plummets into the breakers from his perch on the mainmast, the Fates swirl around him, kiss him, and tell him to drink deeper as he drowns. That both tenderness and death are represented as female, overwhelming and enveloping the male drive toward violence and survival, is just one of many suggestive revisions of the Melvillian universe in Catlin’s adaptation.
Through 9/3: Wed 7:30, Thu 2 and 7:30 PM, Fri 7:30 PM, Sat-Sun 2 and 7:30 PM, Lookingglass Theatre Company, Water Tower Water Works, 821 N. Michigan, 312-337-0665, lookingglasstheatre.org, $45-$65.
