Moby-Dick: Then and Now (review)

R E V I E W RICARDO PITTS-WILEY Adaptor and Director Moby-Dick: Then and Now Mixed Magic Theatre, Pawtucket, Rhode Island; May 10–13, 2007. L ike many in the Melville Society, I first saw Ricardo Pitts-Wiley when he performed Babo in the premiere of Joyce Adler’s Benito Cereno at the New Bedford Whaling Museum (Douglass-Melville Conference, June 2007). In the lobby immediately after the performance, he told me of his dream of adapting Moby-Dick for an inner-city audience at his Mixed Magic Theatre in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. That dream has now materialized in the production of Moby-Dick: Then and Now in the Pawtucket Armory from May 10–13, 2007. Conceived as a way to build community among people of contrasting ages, income levels, social standing, ethnic identification, and educational achievement, this play is also an ambitious attempt to link the imaginary world that Melville created on the deck of the Pequod in the mid-nineteenth century with the real-world concerns of inner-city youth in Pawtucket and the greater Providence area in 2007. In an additional community-building gesture, Ricardo invited the Melville Society Cultural Project to join him in planning a Symposium in which scholars and artists would join the Pawtucket audience in exploring the question, “Why Moby-Dick Matters Now.” The play was staged in the cavernous Pawtucket Armory, its high, rounded rafters suggesting the interior space of a whale. The functional makeshift set featured the deck of a whale ship erected on open scaffolding over the underworld of an inner-city gang (who shared their space with a oneman jazz band directly under Captain Ahab’s cabin). On the upper stage was enacted Melville’s story of Ahab and his crew as embodied by an adult cast. In the lower space was Pitts-Wiley’s story of Alba and her fellow gang members as embodied by youthful recruits of the Mixed Magic Theatre. As Ahab on the upper deck leads the crew of the Pequod in his relentless pursuit of the White Whale that has reaped away his leg, Alba on the street level leads her gang named The One in her relentless pursuit of the “White Thing” that has taken the life of her younger brother Pip (a One wannabe). One test of such a play is its ability, enacted by its contrasting casts, to make meaningful juxtapositions of one world against the other. Another test is the degree to which the two worlds, if shown to be meaningfully similar, are also shown to be arrestingly different. A third test is the degree to which the 68 L E V I A T H A N R E V I E W Figure 1. Ricardo Pitts-Wiley with Kathleen Piercefield’s painting of Queequeg. Photo courtesy of Robert K. Wallace. teenage actors are able to hold their own against the adults performing over their heads. The potential strength of the conception is seen in the opening scene. The play begins on the upper deck as Ahab lunges back and forth while thrusting a knife into his unseen foe in the primal scene of the novel. While he is in the process of stabbing at the creature that is attacking him, we see on the lower level a teenage boy who turns out to be Pip, shot with several beats of the drum. As his screaming sister Alba runs to his fallen body, her grief-stricken pledge to revenge his “black blood” directly echoes Ahab’s shouted intention to chase the White Whale around the world until he spouts “black blood.” The contrasting connotations of each speaker’s “black blood” establish at once the commonality and difference of the two worlds. After this tight, riveting, double-stranded opening scene, Mauro Canepa as Ishmael strides on stage speaking lines from “Loomings” that articulate his A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 69 R E V I E W persona in an extremely lyrical, philosophical, and engaging way. He draws us immediately into his relationship with Queequeg and their response to...