Even without the big, blubbery visual aid, New West still has a whale of a story

Scott Dickensheets

Friday, March 29, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.

All is not whale over at New West Theatre, whose "Moby Dick" is the production that asks, will a Moby-less "Moby" float with local audiences?

Because there won't be any whale in this show. Let's make that clear up front. Nothing realistically resembling a whale, white or otherwise, will cross this stage. It's the Charleston Heights Arts Center, after all, not Sea World. Instead, there will be some white streamers and stuff meant to suggest a whale, in a ritualistic, Chinese-theater sort of way. It's a symbolic whale. A whale of the mind.

How else could they do it? "'Moby Dick hasn't been adapted much (for the stage) because of the obvious difficulties," says the co-director and adaptor; call him Ishm ... er, Brian Kral. "We're not going to fill the theater with water," he says.

Denied the straight realism of boats and seagoing mammals, "we went to the other extreme. We're taking an interesting approach."

Add "Interesting" to "symbolic" and "ritualized" on the short list of terms Kral is forced to fall back on again and again to describe this production, with its postmod mix of primitive storytelling and Herman Melville's elevated language, its techniques cribbed not only from Chinese theater but from Indonesian and African theater as well.

"It's a symbolic, ritualized performance rather than a literal performance," he says. Hmm, interesting.

Everything depends on dramatic orientation, on who tells the story, and why. The play begins where the book ends, with Ishmael surviving the sinking of the whaling vessel by floating on the coffin of his friend Queequog. He resolves to return Queequog's body to his South Pacific island tribe. Queequog, however, committed some sort of native faux pas by leaving in the first place, and he's not welcome back, dead or alive.

"So Ishmael has to convince the tribe that Queequog died honorably with this story of a great whale," Kral says. As it happens, Ishmael has arrived in the middle of a native ritual, and as he begins to recount the story of "Moby Dick," the ritual participants become part of it.

That, people, is dramatic orientation. Framing the story in that context allows New West to tell its story through tribal-like symbolism instead of traditional theatrical realism. Think Cirque du Soleil -- "bodies performing symbolic rather than literal acts," Kral says.

For instance: From African street theater Kral has incorporated a thumping, percussive processional that creates the emotional reality of whaleboats leaving the main ship without having to worry about moving actual watercraft across the stage.

Hearing and seeing this "does something to your pulse rate," Kral says. "You may not accept it intellectually immediately, but on a visceral level it grabs you right away."

He's assisted in this by movement specialist Joe Kucan, with whom Kral has been discussing the project for years. Kral's co-director is Cindy Neal, who, among other things, devised the language and rituals for Queequog's tribe. Good choice: Her master's thesis was "Finding a Primitive Voice in Postmodern Theater."

But will audiences fed on standard stage dramas and musical theater accept the nonliteral harpooning of symbolic whales? Kral is optimistic; give the audiences some credit, he says. "I don't think they'll have too much of a problem." After all, there's nothing realistic about musical-theater characters spontaneously breaking into song. "In the theater, we accept different kinds of reality than what we see on the streets."

It'll help, he adds, that as audiences enter the theater, the tribesmen will already be onstage doing, well, tribal stuff. "You'll know right away that you're in for something that's not an English 101 version of Melville telling 'Moby Dick.'"

Kral says about 90 percent of his adaptation comes straight from the book; his role was mostly compressing the book, which is about the size of a whale, and teasing a dramatic thread from the dense, discursive material. He's been honing the idea for several years, and even sent outlines of the project to theater companies around the country. The Pittsburgh Playhouse nibbled briefly, then passed.

"It's funny that my first impulse had been to look elsewhere," Kral says, "but I had to come back here to do it." Funny, yes, but also symbolic and interesting!