Theater�director Marc Silberschatz had the wonderful idea to stage a revival of Orson Welles MOBY DICK-REHEARSED, which was never staged by Welles in New York City,�despite it being his own favorite theatrical production.�
Welles original production was presented in London for about three weeks, opening on June 15,�1955.�By�all accounts the play was a sensation, and Welles subsequently began to film a movie version of the play that featured most of the the same actors who were in the stage production, but was never completed.�
The current�New York production will also have a run of about three weeks, and received some�excellent reviews in The New York Times and The Village Voice ( see below).
And as�director Silberschatz is a big fan of Orson Welles work, I’m sure if you have a chance to see it, the show is worth checking out before it closes on March 25th.�
Here is the opening scene from Welles play:
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Moby Dick�Rehearsed
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A Drama in two acts
By ORSON WELLES
Being an adaptation-for the most part in blan verse-of the novel by Herman Melville. ACT ONE
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scene: An American theatre at the end of the last century. Theatres are often cold during rehearsals, and the actors do not shed their long, dark overcoats ex�cept when the action, or the parts they are playing, would seem to demand shirt-sleeves. No stage properties are used. Harpoons, oars, lances, gold-pieces, prayer-books, charts and telescopes, all are to be indicated in gesture and mime. For easier reading only a minimum of stage directions are given in the text. The chase in the whale-boa for example, is referred to briefly as literal action, with no attempt to describe the means by which the actors will suggest this in performance. It would not be true to say that there is no scenery. The stage is not bare; it is interestingly and even romantically dressed with all the lumber of an old-fashioned theatre.
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at rise: An empty stage. Behind the usual forest of hanging ropes, suspended sandbags, battens, borders, furled back-drops and stacked wings, there is glimpsed the bare brick wall of the theatre. Here and there are the skeletons of stage platforms, on one of which stands a rather seedy-looking throne. At least two tables, a number of plain kitchen chairs and the sort of small upright organ called an harmonium. (This is actually an electric organ in disguise.) Beneath the shaded work-light a young actor is studying a prompt-book. A young actress sits nearby, listening as he reads aloud:
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the young actor
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“Call me Ishmael…
Some years ago�never mind how long� I thought that I would sail about a littleand see the watery part of the world.
Whenever I grow grim about the mouth,
and hazy in eyes; whenever
it’s a damp November in rny soul;
I count it time to get to sea.
Almost all men, sometime or other,
cherish these same feelings toward the ocean…”�
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(Several actors come on to the Stage during the following. They have arrived far a rehearsal.)
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…Here now is our island city
of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon;
what do you see? On every dock and wharf;
on the extremes! limits of the land;
posted like sentinels: thousands of landsmen,
fixed in ocean reveries…”
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(In partial silhouette, the mute figures of the Actors grouped near the edge of the Stage suggest an illustration of the spoken words.)
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“Inlanders of week-days tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. Does the magnetic virtue of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?
Why did the old Persians hold the ocean holy? � and the still deeper meaning of that story of Narcissus, who, because he could not grasp the mild, tormenting image in the fountain, plunged into it, and drowned. That same image we ourselves see in all rivers, in oceans and in lakes and wells. The image of the un-graspable�the phantom of life; and this is the key to it all …”�
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(A short silence, then a burst of THUNDER! The actors Pay no attention to this, some lighting cigars or cigarettes, and one relaxing with a newspaper. The THUNDER abruptly subsides sand the stage manager, in shirt-sleeves, pops his head out of the prompt-side of the proscenium arch.
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the stage manager. How’s that!
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the young actor. Fine. (Turing to the actress as he closes the prompt-book.) That was a sort of prologue.� There are real scenes later on, of course � with dialogue.
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A middle-aged actor. We know, laddie, we know. God deliver us, we’ve been asked to learn enough of it!
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(Another sudden loud rumble oj THUNDER, followed immediately by the reappearance of the stage man�ager.)
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the stage manager. That was with the thunder sheet instead of the drums.
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the young actor. Fine.
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A serious actor. (Speaking to one of the others.) I was wondering about my role� Oh, I beg your pardon,� I don’t think we’ve been introduced.
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an old “pro.” (With cordiality.) I know you, of course;�Kent, Richmond, lago, Mercutio, our new Second Lead. (Introducing himself.) Eccentric Character, First Comics and General Utility.
(They shake hands )
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the serious actor. How d’ye do.�Now, about this “Starbuck” character I’ve been asked to memorize�
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the young actor. (Joining the group.) That’s the First Mate, an honest, God-fearing sort of fellow. You might say he’s the only voice of sanity in the play.
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A cynical actor. Sanity…?
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(A sharp gust of WIND is heard; then sudden silence and the stage manager re-enters.)______________________
That Great White Whale Through a Wellesian Lens
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By Jason Zinoman – THE NEW YORK TIMES
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It takes a fool or perhaps a genius to adapt one of the greatest American novels for the stage � and Orson Welles was a bit of both. He chased �Moby-Dick� through much of the 1950s. After writing and starring in �Moby Dick � Rehearsed� in 1955, he made his own film version of that Melville classic for British television before starring in John Huston�s. But Welles still wasn�t finished, returning to the novel at the end of his life, filming scenes of himself reading it in one of his many unfinished works. (There are remarkable excerpts on YouTube.)
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Welles may never have caught the big fish in the same way that he captured, say, William Randolph Hearst in �Citizen Kane,� but this gripping revival of �Moby Dick � Rehearsed,� presented by Twenty Feet Productions with a Shakespearean sweep, proves that this was a perfect marriage of man and material.
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It�s easy to forget that Welles was first a man of the theater, and this ferocious drama, a poetic examination of one man�s obsession, is, among other things, a celebration of the stage. It begins almost offhandedly with a group of actors filing into the theater where they are to perform �King Lear.�
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In a light, almost documentary style, Welles satirizes backstage small talk: the complaints about critics, pay and academics. When one performer talks about the need for theater, another corrects him: �Nobody ever needed the theater � except us. Have you ever heard of an unemployed audience?�
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When the vain star (Seth Duerr) enters, he informs the ensemble that they will be performing �Moby-Dick� instead of �Lear,� and that he will play Ahab. This framing device provides a justification for the bare-bones adaptation (everyone wears casual clothes and mimes the props), but the director, Marc Silberschatz, is smart to avoid hammering home the theatrical themes, since the play-within-a-play conceit has become a clich�.
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Instead, he concentrates on suspending our disbelief, relying on a direct, simple staging that tells the story with gusto and clarity. The cramped theater, a black box with bad sightlines, actually helps give a sense of being trapped on a rickety ship.
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Welles, who ruthlessly edited Melville�s novel down to two hours, would no doubt have approved of Dana Sterling�s moody lighting design. But this play rises and falls on the strength of Ahab, and Mr. Duerr is happily up to the challenge. With sunken eyes that betray a touch of madness, he looks like a man losing a battle but refusing to give up.
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He doesn�t perform off his fellow actors so much as recite his lines to the heavens, which makes perfect sense, since he�s playing a dictatorial actor playing a dictatorial captain. At his best, Mr. Duerr�s booming baritone even brings to mind Welles himself. Call me impressed.
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�Moby Dick � Rehearsed� continues through March 25 at the Richmond Shepard Theater, 309 East 26th Street, Manhattan; (212) 868-4444. ***********************************
Whale of a Show
�Taking Melville and Welles to sea
�by J. Hoberman � Village Voice
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Orson Welles’s interest in dramatizing Moby Dick goes back at least to a 1946 radio version; this followed by an oratorio that never happened and a cameo as Father Mapple in John Huston’s movie, which apparently Welles wanted to make. In 1955, he staged his minimalist Moby Dick�Rehearsed in London: A late-19th-century Shakespearean stock company, led by Himself, interrupts a rehearsal of Lear to read-through an adaptation of Herman Melville’s novel. This legendary production, which Welles also attempted to film, ran three weeks and was staged on Broadway seven years later with Rod Steiger as Lear-Ahab-Welles.
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Marc Silberschatz’s bare-bones but robustly acted production may be the first New York has seen since. Performed without a set, Moby Dick�Rehearsed is close to radio drama. The emphasis is on the power of Melville’s language, and the sturdy ensemble gathered in the cozy confines of the Richmond Shepard Theater is anchored by Seth Duerr’s bravura, at times Wellesian, Ahab. The use of the play within the play isn’t at all Pirandellian; once the stage is set, Welles does not break the spell. He does tweak it a bit however, turning Melville’s chapter on the evil of whiteness into a dialogue between Ahab and terrified Pip. The African American cabin boy is played, per Welles’s script, by the company’s Cordelia (Nicole Benish), never more white and womanly than when exclaiming, “Have mercy on a small black boy!”
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