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In late 2014, Portland Experimental Theater Ensemble launched a yearlong quest to capture Moby-Dick onstage. From the beginning, their destination was Juli Crockett's Or, The Whale—a format-busting play that's more poetry than script and twists Herman Melville's classic into a show with four Ahabs. The "constellation" of performances, as PETE calls it, has been nothing if not adventurous.
July's Drowned Horse Tavern was a mermaid cabaret experience that thrust patrons into a sea shanty and served them grog. October's All Well offered a "sightless" play, where attendants reclined in hammocks in a blacked-out basement and were barraged by sounds of an Arctic shipwreck spewed from speakers in 11 different sizes.
Finally, Or, The Whale is in sight.
This weekend, PETE's entire ensemble will reveal the center of its constellation. It boils down to a story about a man who lost his leg, ballooning the Moby-Dick line "Lost: leg. Adrift. At sea." into a theatrical meditation on humankind's search for wholeness.
There are only six characters—Pip, "the deep," and four Ahabs. With one that's more of an idea than a real character and four that are technically the same person, the whale might seem like pared-down theater. In reality, every show in the constellation has been all hands on deck, mining PETE's full ensemble for performers, set design, sound and revisions over the 18 months of rehearsals and workshops. They're a fellowship you'd think was blood-bonded, helmed by Obie Award-winning designer Peter Ksander as director. In a rare show of consistency for an experimental Portland theater, the cast and crew have weathered hundreds of hours together, rehearsing in pitch-black Reed College studios, discussing Melville's tedious passages on whale anatomy and brainstorming how to make actors look like amputees.
"In PETE's process, everything bleeds together," says designer Jenny Ampersand.
But in this constellation, Or, The Whale shines as the most straightforward, in terms of staging, at least. While it may stretch the imagination—the deep anthropomorphized as a vintage deep-sea diver and the Ahabs sporting peg legs of liquid latex with a silicone toe-separator—Ksander divvied up Crockett's continuous script into distinct lines for each character, the audience will be in seats, and the fourth wall stays up.
"Drowned Horse was a bar, then All Well was a crazy amusement park ride," says Ampersand. "I guess this one is more traditional—it actually has a script."
Or, The Whale may want for hammocks and brandy shots at the end, but if this production is more anchored by typical staging, that's not to say it's anticlimactic. A year and a half in production does pale in comparison to Melville's monstrous undertaking (the author notoriously wrote a 139-word footnote explaining the word "gally"). But in terms of ingenuity, PETE stands up to Ahab himself.
Is this normal theater, at last? "Oh my God, no!" says Ampersand. "We don't know what normal is."
see it: Or, The Whale is at the Diver Studio Theater at Reed College, 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd. 7:30 pm Wednesday-Sunday, Jan. 9-23. $25.
Willamette Week