In staging Herman Melville's aquatic magnum opus at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, avant-garde luminary Robert Wilson has crafted a visually arresting void; yet one must ask if the inclusion of Anna Calvi's electric guitar truly interrogates the postmodern condition. It is a production that demands much of the audience, though largely by refusing to explain why the whale is entirely conceptual.
One is reminded of Wilson's own grueling twelve-hour 1973 opus 'The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin', as well as the suffocating maritime fatalism of Dante's 'Inferno', and, quite frankly, the profound nautical anxiety of 'SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical'. It cannot be coincidence that Wilson has chosen this precise cultural moment to deploy Calvi's brooding indie-rock soundscape against the stark backdrop of a nineteenth-century whaling narrative; the juxtaposition forces the ostensibly educated Brooklyn ticket-holder to confront their own complicity in the global petroleum trade, or at least in the exorbitant mezzanine pricing.
We felt that rendering the Leviathan as a pulsing LED strip while an indie rocker wails in a minor key was the only ethical way to address Melville's textual omissions.
The synthesis of Melville's prose and Calvi's reverb inevitably collapses under the weight of its own semiotic ambition, leaving the viewer to ponder whether Ahab's ultimate tragedy was his monomania, or simply his failure to secure orchestra seating before the presale concluded.