Mrs. Ahab Meets the Whale
CFA’s New InMotion Theatre debuts with The Journey
The Journey makes use of dramatic shadow play. In this scene, Captain Ahab, played by Michael Ofori (CFA’18), confronts the whale.
Yo-EL Cassell’s copy of The Journey looks less like a theater script than like the spell book of some Hogwarts professor with a frequent-buyer card at Staples. The pages in the three-ring binder show typical typescript stage directions and story, but there are also the curlicues of dance notation, historical pictures pasted in place, scrawled handwritten comments, and a flock of pink Post-It notes.
The play is a Moby Dick spin-off, the story of Captain Ahab’s wife after the white whale has dragged the obsessed whaler to the briny deep at the end of Herman Melville’s 1851 novel. And in this case, the story is told with movement and dance and voice-overs, with no dialogue from the characters. It’s dreamlike, expressionistic, and poetic, with seagulls and wind spirits, dance and puppetry and music, and of course, the whale.
The Journey follows Mrs. Ahab’s voyage under the sea to confront the whale for taking her husband. “She has to go through the belly of the beast to find out who she is as a person,” says director Cassell, a College of Fine Arts assistant professor of movement. “It’s about embracing our fear, overcoming obstacles, and celebrating the tenacity of the human spirit.”
The first production under the banner of the new InMotion Theatre, The Journey plays at the Joan & Edgar Booth Theatre April 19 to 22, presented by the School of Theatre and the Boston Center for American Performance.
Cassell says he and Jim Petosa, a CFA professor of directing and dramatic criticism and School of Theatre director, created InMotion Theatre to focus on storytelling “primarily through the language of movement and physical acting.” They plan to produce one performance in the fourth quarter of each academic year. “To me, movement is an expressive channel for our inner thoughts and imagination,” Cassell says. “Everything we do in life is movement, and InMotion is to celebrate that.”
For this production, he says, he developed an idea that first came to him in the early 1990s, after he saw a Laurie Anderson performance piece on Moby Dick and read the novel Ahab’s Wife, or, The Star-Gazer, by Sena Jeter Naslund.
Characters express themselves mainly through movement in this production: the Seagull, played by Nicholas Walker (CFA’20), and Celeste Dawn, played by Dana Depirri (CFA’20).
“I was inspired by the one passage in Moby Dick about Ahab’s wife,” Cassell says. “What was her story? She changed him a little bit, accessing his vulnerability, in a way the rest of the novel doesn’t quite capture.”
Even the show’s credits are a little unusual. The Journey was conceived, cocreated, and directed by Cassell and cocreated and written by theater education graduate student Corianna Moffatt (CFA’10,’19), with script contributions and dramaturgy by Georgia Zildjian (CFA’13,’19).
“I had all of these ideas, all of this imagery, all of these inspirations, but I was interested in having someone to write the script from which we could develop the movement and the imagery,” Cassell says. His assistant director, Jeremy Ohringer (CFA’19), recommended Moffatt. They got together last August, he gave her a rough template for what he had in mind, and she began to turn it into a narrative roadmap.
“It’s focusing on this woman’s experience with grief, how grief changes her through her life, and how she comes back to herself out of trauma,” Moffatt says. “It really builds on the strong relationships she’s had with other women in her life, particularly her mother and her daughter. And then there’s a whale.”
Moffatt brought in Zildjian particularly for research into the period. “We became quite informed by her fascination with whales and what whales can do and the weight of whales and the New England–New Bedford spirit of the 1800s,” Cassell says.
Mrs. Ahab is called Celeste, and she appears at three different ages, Celeste Dawn, played by Dana Depirri (CFA’20), Celeste Noon, Elena Morris (CFA’18), and Celeste Dusk, Paula Langton (CFA’03), a CFA associate professor of voice and speech and program head of acting.
In the video above, watch scenes from a rehearsal of The Journey, InMotion Theatre’s debut production, running at the Joan & Edgar Booth Theatre through April 22. Video By Devin Hahn
“One of the fascinating things about it is the transfer from page to body,” Langton says. “I went from kind of looking at the script and going, uh, I don’t know, does this even make sense? And then as soon as I’m up and doing it: oh, never mind, it makes total sense. There are all sorts of things going on besides understanding in a prefrontal cortex kind of way. It’s fascinating; it’s a classic hero’s journey.”
Mark Cohen, a CFA assistant professor of acting, plays one of three versions of Moby Dick, which range from a leviathan among the stars to a phantom shadow falling across the stage to Cohen himself.
“In the beginning, we show the myth of the whale, that he was a horror and a monster, so his shadow appears rather large,” Cassell says. “But what I wanted to show to the audience is that he only did this because he was provoked. That’s when Celeste begins to change a little bit, when she learns about the story through his eyes.”
In this scene, Walker as the Seagull leads the other characters on a metaphorical flight.
The Journey incorporates carefully designed choreography and also passages where the performers come up with their own movements. Movement direction is credited to Cassell, in partnership with the cast and Ohringer.
One more unusual angle: Cassell has partnered with Won Ju Lim, a CFA assistant professor of art and sculpture, whose installation class is creating an environment the audience will pass through on the way into the theater.
InMotion Theatre: The Journey, presented by the Boston Center for American Performance, Thursday, April 19, 7:30 pm; Friday, April 20, 8 pm. (with postshow discussion); Saturday, April 21, 2 and 8 pm; Sunday, April 22, 2 pm. Tickets: $15 general admission, $10 BU alumni, $7.50 with CFA membership, available here; free with BU ID, at the door on the day of performance, subject to availability.
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