Guilted by his local Mormon church into repudiating his love for Charlie, Allan was equally driven to wage a war against his body and his nature. Poignantly enough, Charlie’s boyfriend Allan endured a similarly excruciating fate-though much in reverse-having starved himself to death. Regardless, at the dark heart of The Whale is the portrait of prolonged suicide, never explicitly stated and perhaps only partially understood-even by Charlie. Or perhaps Charlie feels as though he were himself the biblical prophet Jonah, swallowed by a whale, and now helplessly carried hence by a leviathan form he finds repulsive.
The Whale’s frequent allusions to Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick suggest that lurking beneath Charlie’s immense surfaces is an almost Ahab-like obsession-driven from within-to strike dead his own cetacean monstrosity. But Charlie insists that that money should go to his daughter, Ellie (Leah Karpel), whom Charlie has finally reached out to after fifteen years of estrangement.īut perhaps money isn’t the real reason Charlie foregoes treatment. Why, for instance, does Charlie so adamantly refuse medical treatment for his impending congestive heart failure-a decision which, as his friend and nurse Liz (Cheryl Graeff) so forcefully reminds him, will lead inevitably to his death? With roughly $120,000 stashed away in a secret bank account, Charlie could afford the treatment if he so wishes. Rather than making a martyr or a saint of Charlie (Dale Calandra), suffering at the hands of a society which has tragically failed to understand him-as in the vein of Bernard Pomerance’s 1977 play The Elephant Man-Hunter has wisely opted to pit Charlie against himself and to make of him his own worst enemy. No, Hunter thankfully has more respect for his audience, and he doesn’t shirk from showing how Charlie’s gross obesity is emulative of something equally pained within. Now at a cursory glance, this sounds little better than a cheap platitude-a dopey equivalent of saying how real beauty’s “on the inside” or how beauty’s only “skin deep.” But that would be to reduce Hunter’s play to a greeting card cliché, which it most certainly is not. Rather, it’s about the man who’s living inside the 600-pound man. Hunter’s play The Whale-now making its Midwest premiere at Victory Gardens-isn’t about a morbidly obese 600-pound man effectively shackled to his living room couch. This probingly honest dramedy about the weight we carry receives a successful Midwest premiere.Īt the risk of sounding mawkish, Samuel D. Starring Will Allan, Dale Calandra, Cheryl Graeff, Patricia Kane & Leah Karpel
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