Harpooning Fate

By T.E.K.

To devise a version of Moby Dick as a one-man, 90-minute theater piece comes under the heading of "They said it couldn't be done." Jack Aranson has done it, superbly. Aranson was born in Los Angeles, trained as an actor at the Old Vic, toured Ireland, and in 1963 formed his own San Francisco City Theater. He is currently doing Moby Dick at college theaters in the Bay Area. Berkeley students are as still as un-dropped pins on the nights he appears.

To appreciate his achievement, it is desirable, but not necessary, to have read the novel. By cultural osmosis, even the nonreader knows the basic story. The opening line, "Call me Ishmael," sounds a ghostly summoning bell on everyman's ship, Pequod, "a noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy."

Aranson hews to four grand themes: the sea. the quest, the majestic, malignant power of the white whale, and Ahab's fierce, tragic, demonic will to harpoon fate. Ahab v. the first mate Starbuck, the man of reason, forms the main line of conflict. Starbuck has signed on to hunt whales, not to pursue Ahab's monomaniacal revenge. Melville means us to know that when a man sets out to probe the secrets of the universe, he is far past reason, just as the seafaring Renaissance explorers went far past their maps.

Aranson seems almost to have been born on the wharves of Nan tucket. He walks with sea legs. The floorboards become a deck, rolling under his feet with the long, steady rhythm of an ocean swell. There are fogs, stars, spars and billowing sails in his voice.

New England Mind. Melville was a born monologuist, which helps Aranson mightily. The novel is replete with presentiments of drama, explicitly written-in stage directions that invaluably guide a fine actor. Thus Ahab's first appearance is heralded by the words: "He stood before us with a crucifixion in his face." Aranson turns that cue into a reality.

Through the twelve characters and 16 scenes, he never relinquishes the mood of intense spiritual crisis. He conjures up the harsh, flinty, arrogant valor of the 19th century New England mind, which, demanding much of others, demanded even more of itself. With a God such as Melville's, one scarcely needs a Devil. He, like Hawthorne, might have taken for his text Jonathan Edwards' fearsome sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." It is those hands, and not Moby Dick's great maw, that finally engulf Pequod and its doomed captain and crew.

With this one-man show, Jack Aranson has joined a select and illuminating company, that of John Gielgud in Ages of Man, Siobhan McKenna in Here Are Ladies, Emlyn Williams as Charles Dickens and Hal Holbrook in Mark Twain Tonight . Moby Dick is the most formidable task of the lot.

T.E.K

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.