The Whale by Samuel D. Hunter (review)

In October 2012, Vilma Soltesz, a 425-pound Bronx woman, was refused boarding by three airlines as she and her husband attempted to return to the United States from Hungary so that she could resume medical treatment for diabetes and kidney disease. The airlines claimed that they had been physically unable to accommodate her due to her size and limited mobility. Unwilling to trust Hungarian doctors, the couple attempted to make other arrangements, but Soltesz died of kidney failure two days after their last failed attempt.

I thought of these events six weeks later as I flew to New York in my eighteen-inch-wide coach seat to see Obie Award-winning playwright Samuel Hunter’s play The Whale during its extended run at Playwrights Horizon. Set in a dingy apartment in northern Idaho, The Whale is the story of Charlie, a 600-pound man in his early to mid-40s who teaches online writing classes and attempts to reconnect with his 17-year-old daughter Ellie, whom he has not seen since he left the family to take up with his gay lover fifteen years earlier. This lover, a former Mormon missionary and student of Charlie’s named Alan, wasted away out of guilt after attending a sermon that his father delivered for his benefit at a local Mormon church. Charlie has dealt with his grief by eating himself to his present size. He is cared for by Liz, the sister of his deceased boyfriend, and over the course of the play he also interacts with the openly hostile Ellie, a young Mormon missionary named Elder Thomas, and Mary, his alcoholic ex-wife. Charlie suffers from congestive heart failure, and although he knows he is dying, he refuses to go to the hospital.

Hunter’s play is tightly conceived and written, and its vivid characters reveal themselves to one another and to the audience in spare, often disarming dialogue. Ellie (Reyna de Courcy) hides her vulnerability beneath switchblade-like insults and rejections, while Mary (Tasha Lawrence) approaches Charlie with a resentment that has softened over the years into affection. Liz (Cassie Beck) pushes Charlie to seek medical help so that she will not have to relive her brother’s slow death. And while Elder Thomas (played by Cory Michael Smith) befriends Charlie out of his determination to make a difference in at least one person’s life, the problems he ends up confronting are his own. His scenes with Ellie, as the two explore the boundaries of trust, are among the play’s funniest.

But it is Charlie, played by Shuler Hensley, who dominates this play both physically and emotionally. In Mimi Lien’s cramped set, Charlie sat in a sagging couch surrounded by a computer table, a walker, a claw for reaching things, and countless empty and half-filled food containers. Except for the times when he walked laboriously to the offstage bathroom or wheeled himself in a wheelchair that Liz brought him, he loomed over the play’s action from this seated position, speaking to his online students through a microphone and shifting uncomfortably to interact with those around him. Henley’s Charlie was engrossing and uncomfortable to watch. According to a video on the Playwrights Horizon website, the fat suit that Hensley wore was constructed based on photographs of actual people with Charlie’s weight. Because of the obvious need for some such outfit, I felt apprehensive before seeing this play at the thought of a normatively sized actor acting fat and the potential for mimicry this entails (the play’s title did not help my misgivings). But Hensley’s performance effected a powerful blending of his body and that of the character he plays. The fat suit may have weighed only fifty pounds, but it required a level of exertion that Shuler accentuated with his performance. Hensley sweated throughout the play, his breathing became increasingly labored, and the balancing act required in order to maneuver his body when seated and standing was clearly precarious. The...