Preshow announcements typically fall outside the critic’s purview, but at Deep Blue Sound it enhanced the pleasure. Producer par excellence Maria Striar, whose company Clubbed Thumb has debuted countless wonderfully strange plays over the years, greeted the audience at the Public with a note about noise. From the floor above, Striar briskly explained, might come wrestling thuds caused by the heavyset (and talented) performers of Sumo. Also, a hundred feet below, the 6 local would be rattling to and from Astor Place. Thus sonically sandwiched, we settled in. And you know what? As Abe Koogler’s sweet, sad village mosaic revealed itself heart fissure by heart fissure, silence spoke volumes. Ambient audio acquired mystery.
It’s staring us in the face starting with the title, which alludes to sonic waves that penetrate (or don’t) the oceanic highways of whales—a pod of which has stopped visiting an island on the Puget Sound. Toward the end of 90 rich, funny and devastating minutes, there’s a surprise visitor (of the cetacean variety), upset by “the loss of silence.” His watery home has been polluted by human-made noise: “Weird booms in the distance, engines,” the creature notes. “You have no idea how far the sound of engines travels, when you’re a whale underwater.”
Our gentle leviathans may cherish quietude, but silence is killing humans—no matter how much they babble. Koogler’s portrait of Pacific Northwesterners unfolds in a handful of group scenes and several brief snapshots, focusing on nine Chatty Cathies (and Chads) whose billows of crosstalk mask a certain emotional muteness. There’s an irascible, high-handed volunteer mayor (Crystal Finn) who may be the Karennest Karen ever, bulldozing through town halls convened to discuss the Whale Problem. Better adjusted are John (Arnie Burton), Mary (Miriam Silverman) and Ella (Maryann Plunkett), three of the more worldly town inhabitants. Yet even they can’t communicate. Ella is dying from cancer and has made plans for assisted suicide, an exit strategy she hides from her longtime friends. Whipsawing between practicality and self-delusion, Ella fixates on a somewhat random new friendship with local newspaper editor Joy Mead (Mia Katigbak), whom she approaches to compose her obituary.
Another inmate on this island of misfit toys is Les (Jan Leslie Harding), a painfully shy horse groomer trying to start a romantic relationship with a pen pal that seems doomed. Pointedly, everyone in the play is single, separated, or divorced, yearning for connection but grabbing at empty air. The most extreme untethered soul is Homeless Gary (Ryan King), a stony-faced vagrant with a chainsaw who cuts wood with Aspergian tenacity. Gary lives like one of the stray dogs that plague the island. He functions as a sort of bridge between the human and animal worlds, realms that have fallen out of joint.
Even though melancholy weirdness comes naturally to Koogler (e.g., Staff Meal) Deep Blue Sound is not all hurt and alienation. There’s plenty of wry humor and flat-out hilarious bits—often from Finn, whose specialty is women on the verge of goggle-eyed freakouts. When Les mildly suggests someone take a boat out to search for whales, Mayor Annie’s ranting rejection (“That’s the worst idea ever. That’s truly the worst idea ever. I mean that is the worst idea ever” and so on) makes for one of the funniest/scariest stage meltdowns in ages. Later, Finn plays a mother whose dance-obsessed boy (Armando Riesco, on microphone) nervously shows her his moves. The barely hidden dismay and disgust that clouds her face is horribly funny.
So Finn is a hoot, but the entire cast is a tasting menu of acting brilliance. Burton’s gentle humanism runs like a lifeline through the play; John’s attempt to befriend Homeless Gary turns into a haunting lesson on the limits of empathy. Likewise, Katigbak’s droll, understated Joy hits a wall of intimacy when Ella asks her to witness her dying. Harding’s quavery voice and mousy physical presence initially invites laughter, until the depth of Les’s loneliness crushes us. And Plunkett has played her share of women frail of body but iron of will (in Broadway’s The Notebook, for example); Ella is yet another portrayal of shocking emotional transparency. In less showy roles, Riesco, Silverman and Carmen Zilles do no less effective work.
In its spareness and dreamy drift from fragmentary scene to direct address, director Arin Arbus’s superbly focused and balanced production inevitably brings to mind Our Town, but with ecological dread and greater social anomie. The ghost of Thornton Wilder surely perched on Koogler’s shoulder during the composition. This current production remounts the one Clubbed Thumb premiered in Summerworks two years ago and remains a model of less-is-more eloquent restraint. (Not for nothing is the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts” briefly sung.) All the scenic collective dots needs is a green carpet and some wooden chairs, plus a picture of a whale hanging on a wall (there’s a surprise room I won’t reveal). Isabella Byrd provides scrupulously functional lighting to get us indoors and out. The design is rounded out by character-perfect couture by Emily Rebholz and tactical heightening of sound by Mikaal Sulaiman. Did I faintly clock thumps above and metallic rumbling below? Sure. They sounded like exotic beasts which we limited, land-based creatures may hope to glimpse one day.
Deep Blue Sound | 1hr 30mins. No intermission. | Public Theater | 425 Lafayette Street | 212-967-7555 | Buy Tickets Here
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