The Dolores school district is preparing for its performance of “Moby Dick – Rehearsed,” scheduled for the secondary school commons on Friday, Jan. 10 and Saturday, Jan. 11.
The Friday performance is at 7 p.m., and the Saturday performances are at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Tickets are $3 for students and $5 for adults.
Written by Orson Welles, the play is adapted from Herman Melville’s novel “Moby Dick.” The story follows Captain Ahab and his obsession with killing Moby Dick, the white whale, and the dangers and consequences of his quest.
“The dialogue is pretty much straight from the book, written in kind of a free verse as the actors say their lines,” Dolores theater director Peter Swingle told The Journal. “We’ve been rehearsing since September; it is a very challenging script.”
The cast and crew consists of 25 to 30 people, including students from sixth grade through high school.
Swingle said the play has been on his mind for several years, but he was waiting for the cast that could bring the big story to life on Dolores’s small stage.
“That’s always a challenge, but we’ve accomplished that, I think,” Swingle said. “We’ve rehearsed over break for four days, and the artists have been meeting weekly since September.”
The stage won’t feature a whale or a ship; the cast will encourage the audience to complete the story with their imagination.
“One of the great lines in this is one cast member’s, who says, ‘Peace out our imperfections in your mind, and when we speak of whale boats and whales, you see them,’” Swingle said. “We don’t have a whale. We don’t have a ship, but we conjure that between actor and audience in their minds through music and pantomime, movement and dialogue, staging, ladders, step ladders and platforms. We have old tarps they use as sails.”
Looking back on the hard work that has commenced in the months leading up to the play’s opening night, Swingle said what stands out is the dedication and work put in by the students involved in the play.
“The intense amount of work and devotion that they have put into bringing this story to their audience has moved me,” Swingle said. “There’s a line that Ishmael says, describing Ahab’s tear falling into the Pacific, and adding that one drop in this eternity … it’s the beautiful way they add the lines written by Melville and then put into the play by Orson Welles.”
Though the three leads in the original book and play are male, Dolores’s Captain Ahab, Ishmael and Starbuck are played by female students, and Swingle said they have done a “beautiful” job bringing their characters to life.
Jadyn Gorsuch plays Ahab, while Amelia Pym plays Ishmael, one of the crew members on Ahab’s ship. Pym is also on the art crew.
Both students said their love of theater drew them to try out for the play. Pym also helped with woodworking and other aspects of set design.
Gorsuch and Pym both noted that getting into their characters was difficult at first, but the more they learned about their role, the more they could bring their characters to life.
“It’s channeling the emotion,” Gorsuch said. “It’s kind of hard to envision wanting to kill a whale so passionately, but you kind of let that anger fuel you, and it’s so powerful.”
“I struggled with finding out who Ishmael was as a character,” Pym echoed. “It was a large journey trying to find out how I wanted to act him, but he’s experienced a lot, and he’s telling the story how he sees it. I thought that was also very impactful. It’s been a joy finding out who he is and becoming like him.”
The poetic script is one of the aspects of the play the leads hope the audience finds impactful, as well as the deep and meaningful messages found throughout the story.
“I hope they realize the depth of it,” Gorsuch said. “Herman Melville was such an amazing author. There’s so many fascinating things in the script, if you really listen, and some of the things we say have such a beautiful meaning to them … I just hope people watch and enjoy the show. I hope they are impacted and I hope they find some interest in the book if they haven’t already read it.”
“It’s very, in my opinion, a poetic script,” Pym said. “I think it has a lot of value and a lot of messages. So, I really hope the audience can really be impacted by the play.”
