A detail I caught in the curtain call for The Whale, Samuel D. Hunter’s tragicomedy directed by Aaron Oetting at Cockroach Theater October 9-25, captured its emotional impact. The play’s tension crescendos in its final minutes when the main character, Charlie, a morbidly obese man who’s been slowly eating himself to death, spends the last of his strength on a final symbolic act: to stand and walk across the room to his estranged teenage daughter, Ellie. As he heaves and wheezes, the girl sobs her way through an essay she’d written about Moby-Dick years earlier, an exercise meant to calm her online English teacher father, who cherished the paper as a perfect specimen of literary honesty.
“I felt saddest of all when I read the boring chapters that were only descriptions of whales,” Ellie quotes her younger self, shouting frantically as if to hasten the coming ambulance, “because I knew that the author was just trying to save us from his own sad story …” As the whale finally rises, the theater goes dark. Charlie is dead.
Almost immediately, though, when I saw the play Saturday, October 24, the house lights flickered back on and the play’s five actors came onstage for their bow. It happened so quickly that I had no time to recover from what had just happened. Jakob Sauter and Aviana Glover’s seamless embodiment of Charlie and Ellie, respectively, had me believing I was actually witnessing a man’s death and his daughter’s futile, overdue attempt to keep him alive. Too distraught to applaud, I daubed my face with a soggy tissue. As Glover took her place beside Sauter on the stage, I noticed she was crying too.
Something about her display of raw sadness consoled me, not just because I had experienced the same feeling, but because it showed her devotion to a difficult role. Until the moment of Charlie’s death, Ellie is atrociously mean. The play has many tough themes — same-sex love amid religious intolerance, codependency, infidelity — but Ellie’s anger over being abandoned by her father as a toddler and subsequently raised by an alcoholic mother provides the energy needed to keep its heavy messages afloat. The reveal of a lonely teenager who’d been hiding under a façade of rage was followed immediately by the reveal of an actor who’d dug deep into her own psyche to transport her audience to place of love and redemption.
I didn’t find the remaining actors’ portrayals so moving. At times, I was even distracted by the hyperactive pacing of Ela Rose (who played Liz) and exaggerated staggering of Valerie Carpenter Bernstein (Mary). But Hunter’s writing, along with Sauter and Glover’s performances, more than made up for any flaws, especially in those final moments — moments so profound that even the actors cried.
