Not for Students Only: Digital 'Dick'
“There she blows! A hump like a snow-hill…”
My favorite line made it into the highly condensed and digitally theatricalized version of Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick; or, The Whale” shown online this week – and On Demand until year’s end -- by Bay Street Theater in the old Long Island whaling village of Sag Harbor.
The show was created for the theater’s state-approved Literature Live! program that dramatizes American classics for middle- and high-schools in the region, supplemented by lesson plans and reference materials. Over 30,000 kids have been served in the last dozen years.
But this whale of a tale (tail?), albeit downsized and smartly simplified, is not for students only. The production has taken Bay Street another leap forward in its development of digital theater for the Pandemic and beyond, even as it announces plans for a new and larger brick-and-mortar home nearby.
The digital design starts with multiple actors individually Zooming their parts from home, but then being deftly removed from the usual Zoom boxes and shown ensemble against a variety of settings: singing shanties and raising sails together on the deck of the ill-fated Pequod, searching for leaks in the darkened hold, lowered away in small boats to hunt down the Great White Whale – and, ultimately, become its victims
Whales come both in period prints and underwater video, with quick cuts and dramatic music as the action accelerates. Colorful sunrises and sunsets give an open sea feel--an interesting contrast to the intimacy created by the original limit of two or three characters per scene in Bay Street’s first digital production, “Awake at Night,” eerie adaptations of three Edgar Allan Poe short stories.
For Moby Dick, celebrated stage, screen and TV actor Harris Yulin (Scarface, Ghostbusters II, Clear and Present Danger) brings depth and dignity to the vengefully mad Captain Ahab, supported by a diverse cast of other veteran performers -- Dan Domingues, Wonza Johnson, Nehal Joshi, John Kroft, Trent Saunders – as well as Bay Street’s own Director of Education, Allen O’Reilly, who also wrote the script.
In a Zoom talkback following the final curtain, and included with the On Demand version, director Will Pomerantz and members of the company explain the challenges of acting alone but with scene-mates in mind, then of assembling all the videos and backgrounds so they approach the look of live action.
And so they do. How much closer they are yet to get is a tale worth keeping watch for.
More information and tickets: https://www.baystreet.org/page/literature-live-presents-moby-dick/