Panych Makes Music With Moby Dick

Catherine Kustanczy writes for the New Theatre Review:

"As well as Shakespeare, Shaw, and large-scale musicals being produced at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, there are four new works premiering this season, including Shakespeare’s Universe (Her Infinite Variety), performed at the outdoor Festival Pavilion, There Reigns Love, devised and performed by British actor/writer Simon Callow, and Palmer Park, Joanna McClelland Glass’ exploration of interracial tensions in a Detroit suburb. And then there’s Moby Dick. Unlike other works, there’s no declaiming, no speeches, no laments or words of love. In fact, there’s no dialogue at all. Governor General Award-winning director and playwright Morris Panych has crafted the staged adaption of the 1851 Herman Melville novel as a mix of dance, movement, and mime, all set to the moody orchestral music of French composer Claude Debussy.

"Advance buzz has quietly been building around the production, which in and of itself, is unlike anything Stratford has ever staged in its fifty-five year history. Yet it’s just the sort of project the festival needs in order to attract younger audiences interested in experimental works; the development of such a work is also important in keeping the flow of ideas and projects constant between various Canadian theatre artists."

"Ferry says initial good notice came from the sound designers on the show, and spread like wildfire through the festival’s acting company. The Festival’s Artistic Director, Des McAnuff named Moby Dick as one of the must-sees of the season. But Ferry isn’t jumping the gun: 'I’m a bit worried, really.' Shows with good buzz usually get skewered by critics after all, and are rarely given a chance to develop their own rhythms, much less their own personalities. But with Moby Dick, Ferry explains, there has been consistent and equal involvement with all the artists in the production. Indeed, the program recognizes the input of everyone, listing them all by name. 'It’s been a really interesting process,' Ferry says, his blue eyes widening, 'and it’s been great to get to know everybody, and form those relationships early on. When we turned up (in Stratford), we were ready to get going. The stage managers were different, but they seen the video, and the whole thing had been scored. The sound techs had this huge screen with numbers on it too, so it was pretty together by time we got here.'

"Music is central to the work, with the action, plot, and characterizations of the novel being dictated by Debussy’s works. Moby Dick employs three pieces from the composer’s canon: La Mer, Jeux, and his three Nocturnes. The latter, composed in 1899, has three movements, titled “Clouds”, “Festivals”, and suitably enough, “Sirens” (three female dancers writhe, stretch, and move sinuously across the stage as the mythical sea beasts as part of the stage adaptation). Jeux, from 1912, was originally written for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and was described at the time, rather prophetically, as a 'danced poem'. La Mer, composed between 1903 and 1905, is one of his most admired and frequently performed works; the composer himself subtitled the piece 'three symphonic sketches', as if the term 'symphony' was far too constricting. With names like “From Dawn To Midday”, “Play of the Waves” and “Dialogue Between Wind and Waves” serving as labels for each movement, Melville’s novel might seem like a natural choice through which to connect literary seafaring themes with musical ones.

"But Debussy’s music is anything but narrative-driven; it is instead a musical meditation. Hearing it, one is struck by the lush, sensuous instrumentation, and the swaying sonic undulations that invoke the piece’s namesake; pairing it with Melville’s whale of a tale, however, adds another level of drama that is initially a challenge for viewers who aren’t well-versed in the novel’s finer plot points, let alone in French impressionist music. Any confusion over onstage action, or questions about mounting conflict, rely on the audience’s imagination, dancing with Debussy’s music as a full partner, to fill in the missing steps.

"Indeed, the production is filled with striking, poetic images, like sails made from men’s shirts, a preacher high on a pulpit, and a female dancer posing, nearly Christ-like, as a gutted whale. Moby Dick is filled with the sorts of images –and by extension, drama – that will stick in the collective memories (and perhaps fire up the imaginations) of its viewers. Like Debussy’s music, Melville’s words float, shimmy, sway, and echo within their own specific rhythms, evoking the gentle, then harsh waves of the sea. Moby Dick is an attempt to convey the awesome beauty and ferocious power of not only the hefty Melville novel, but of the natural world itself. The narration is an extension of that intent; it is utilized less for laying down plot points than for sonic counterpoint, as a means of weaving through and around Debussy’s score. The spoken word becomes less about plot and more about using the senses and the imagination as guides for onstage action. The process of deciding to include narration was, however, a difficult one. 'At one point, both Ahab and Ishmael were doing more narrative,' explains Ferry about the show, 'and then it was decided there would be no narrative. And then there was narrative, and then only Ishmael, as he’s the narrator anyway, so it makes sense. But it’s very impressionistic.'

"'One of the great scenes in American literature, if not in all English literature, is where Ahab is discovered by Starbuck, and he’s weeping at the side of the boat, and they have a whole conversation about their wives back home -how they’ll never seeing them again, about the people they’ve lost. It’s a very powerful scene. Then there’s a passage in the book that describes Ahab sniffing the wind like a dog. I just had to look for images that lay in there already.'

"For one of this country’s most versatile theatre artists, who has played everything from Hamlet (twice) to the tightly-wound cop Donnie in George F. Walker’s Suburban Motel series, was Artistic Director of the Resurgence Theatre Company, and has directed numerous works including The Last Days of Judas Iscariot (for which he won a Dora award), and Brendan Gall’s Alias Godot, working on a project as unconventional as Moby Dick has been a real treat.

"'It’s certainly different than anything I’ve done,' he says with a laugh. 'I’ve never done anything like this, so I can’t really compare it. Your emotional line is carried by the music, it tells you how you feel in many ways. Your plotline is told by the novel and the aspects of the novel you’ve chosen to play… but for me…' He pauses, considering his words before flashing a smile. 'I won’t back down. I go one-hundred-percent into something. You tell me when it’s too much and I’ll stop. So for me, the image (of Ahab) was a cross between silent film and pantomime… and movement theatre, because that’s what it really is. In terms of approaching acting, the more I listen to the music, and know when my cue is, the more I can fill in, clearly and emotionally and gesturally, what the music is demanding from me. There’s stuff you’re still discovering in every performance too - 'Oh, I hear that now', 'Oh I never heard that note' 'What can that add to it?' or, 'Do I do nothing?' -you make choices like that. It’s a different kind of approach and working. I’d definitely do it again.'"

Read the entire article.

Buy tickets for Moby Dick, on stage now through October 18.

Profile: David Ferry

From Richard Ouzounian at the Toronto Star:

"Talk about perfect casting.

"When Morris Panych went looking for someone to play the madly driven Captain Ahab in his new adaptation of Herman Melville's Moby Dick – now in previews at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival prior to an Aug. 17 opening – he was lucky enough to get his first choice: David Ferry.

"It's not that the rugged 46-year-old actor actually has one leg or spends his nights and days chasing after an elusive white whale, but he does know more than a little bit about obsession.

"For 30 years now, Ferry has been pursuing his dream of creating great original theatre in this country with a single-mindedness that the captain of the Pequod would have envied.

"'Sometimes you want something so badly that you turn your back on other things you know you shouldn't ignore,' admits Ferry, blurring the line between Ahab and himself even further.
It's a day on which Ferry has no rehearsals and is ostensibly off, but the workaholic is spending the free time renovating his Toronto home.

"'I never knew there was so much to faucets,' he sighs. 'It's mind-blowing.'

"His wife, the equally talented actor and director Kyra Harper, is keeping a wary eye on the proceedings in the background. She's totally on side for the home renovation, but wonders – with a streak of practicality that Ferry blissfully lacks – if it's the kind of task a man ought to undertake while he's in rehearsals as Ahab.

"'Kyra,' he sighs, with that wonderful mix of resignation and affection only those married a long time can feel, 'she's the one who's always asking me, Do you have to take that third job?'

"But he does. That's what makes Ferry tick and it always has, although the clock only really seemed to start working in overdrive once he passed his 40th birthday, 'So much to do, so little time left,' he explains. 'I saw friends dying all around me with things left undone. I didn't want to be one of them.'

"If truth be told, Ferry was born to the breed. Some suggest he must have left the womb emoting. His parents back in St. John's were both heavily involved in the community theatre of the time. His father also ran a chain of radio stations in Newfoundland and his mother, while ostensibly a housewife, still found time to direct the first stage works seen on television in the region.

"Young Ferry had a baptism of fire at age 15, when he was cast in the leading role of Tom Cahill's Tomorrow Will Be Sunday, a play light years ahead of its time about a young man dealing with the emotional damage of having been sexually molested by an elder.

"In 1967, the centennial year, the Dominion Drama Festival decided that everyone should present a Canadian play, and Newfoundland's entry was Cahill's searing drama, with Ferry along for the ride. 'I got hooked for sure,' he laughs. 'We were all in the festival that year, R.H. Thomson, Terry Tweed, Robert Charlebois. It was amazing.'

"Taken with the young man's talent, Newfoundland playwright Michael Cook insisted that the National Theatre School audition on The Rock for the first time. Ferry became a student.

"After graduation, he soon found himself in what he called 'the defining theatre moment of my career' – the production of James Reaney's The Donnellys, directed by Keith Turnbull, which became the signature piece of the NDWT Theatre Company.

"But Ferry kept moving, and a stint opposite Glynis Johns in Terence Rattigan's Cause Celebre at Edmonton's Citadel Theatre wound up bringing him to Broadway.

"'They had mounted Hugh Leonard's play A Life with an all-American and British cast,' recalls Ferry, 'and they were going to take it to New York. But one of the young men wasn't any good and director Peter Coe remembered me from the previous year. So they flew me in and I got the part.'

"The show wasn't a hit, but one of its cast members, Helen Stenborg, was a member of the renowned Circle Repertory Theatre.

"She insisted that their resident playwright, Lanford Wilson, see Ferry in action. He was so taken that he wrote a part for him in their next show, A Tale Told.

"Ferry was well launched in America at that point, but his heart belonged up north, and he returned. For the next quarter century he criss-crossed the country, playing a wide variety of roles and eventually emerging as a first-rate director and administrator as well.

"But, as he puts it, "This was going to be the first summer I didn't have to run a theatre," and he was looking forward to resting, when Panych paid him a call and Ferry couldn't say no.

"'I've never done a piece like this. There's very little text, just voice-over, mixed in with the movement. Morris is truly in phenomenal form. At the end of every day's rehearsal, there's been applause from the actors to salute him for the work we've done that day. Man, that never happens.'

"The often-deadly Stratford buzz is good on this one, and Des McAnuff, Christopher Plummer and Michael Langham have reportedly seen it in previews and been generous with their praise.
To Ferry's eyes, 'It's about Ahab and his obsession. It's an insane spiritual journey. He chases himself trying to kill what he hates in himself and it drives him crazy.'

"All this sounds exciting enough, but the Studio Theatre is extremely small. What are they doing about the whale itself?

"The answer is vintage Ferry: 'There's no frigging way we can build a whale on that stage, so why even try?'

"Good point."