Orson Welles's "Moby Dick Rehearsed'

In the opening scene of Moby Dick Rehearsed a group of actors assemble for a run-through. "Moby-Dick isn't a play," one of them remarks. "It's a book." Indeed.

That's the problem the late Orson Welles encountered when he sought to stage Herman Melville's 1851 classic seafaring allegory about a search for the unattainable. Melville's novel (whose title included that hyphen) was published within a year of two other classics, The Scarlet Letter and Uncle Tom's Cabin, which also embody an ornate and distant literary style.

Melville's work is notable for its descriptions of skies and seas and faces. That, of course, is hard to encompass in dialogue. Melville's narrative also includes multiple scenes with several ships upon the ocean— again, difficult to put on a stage.

Melville's language is also purple with stylized imagery— a "boggy, soggy, squitchy picture," for example, and "thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries." Melville himself remarked to a friend that "the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree." And who would dare put that whale on a stage?

But in Welles's script, one of the actors insists that Moby-Dick was meant to be read aloud: "There are things in it that simply have to be heard."

King Lear, too

Some of the lines do sound wonderful when spoken aloud, such as Ahab describing "the snow white wings of speckled birds" or saying of the whale, "His fins are bored and scalloped like a lost sheep's ear." It is a thoroughly worthwhile experience to hear this colorful language.

It's also wondrous to see how directors John Doyle and Randall Wise creatively utilized the small space of Norristown's Centre Theater and expanded its horizons to represent an endless ocean. Some of the images created by this production were spectacular, especially when they simulated a crew of oarsmen in a small rowboat.

Because Moby Dick Rehearsed is presented as just a read-through, we accept the lack of costumes, the rudimentary props and the absence of a whale.

The actors appear in contemporary street clothes as they drift into the theater, as if arriving for a rehearsal. They complain about their boss and their forthcoming production of King Lear. This device enabled Welles to mount a scene from Lear as well as comment about actors and audiences before commencing the Moby Dick read-through.

Color-blind, to a fault

The director, sporting a wide-brimmed hat and cigar, becomes Captain Ahab, a "grand, ungodly, godlike man"— seemingly a perfect double role for Welles. A stage manager reads directions that include some of Melville's language.

The Iron Age cast, headed by Anthony Giampetro as Ahab, included the versatile Adam Altman, Luke Moyer and Ray Saraceni. They did an excellent job projecting Melville's antiquated metatheatrical language.

Because the casting was color-blind— as Welles intended it— and gender-blind, too, some theatergoers might take a while to realize that the youthful Pip (played here by the white and female Michelle Pauls) is a black boy. Pip's color is important to the drama: Melville wrote, "A whale would sell for 30 times what you would, Pip, in Alabama," thus raising the issue of racial injustice far ahead of his contemporaries.

Other vivid lines contrast the whiteness of the snowy sea foam and of the whale with the blackness of Pip's hand. Ahab also reminds us that many fearsome things are white, like fog, albatrosses and ghosts.

Welles's short attention span

This staging is so far-flung that some scenes were difficult to see from some seats. At such moments your attention wants to zoom in. The production cries out for filming or televising.

It's a shame that Welles lacked Ahab's fierce determination to see a project through. Welles wrote Moby Dick Rehearsed in 1955 and directed and starred in its London production. Rod Steiger played Ahab in a New York production in 1962. But Welles quickly tired of this project and moved on, abandoning his plan to make a movie of Moby Dick Rehearsed.