The Whale rises on the strength of Phil Fiorini’s performance
When you go to a play about a 600-pound man, and that play is titled The Whale, you don’t expect it to afford its main character much humanity. When the play opens with the title character masturbating furiously enough to provoke cardiac arrest, you don’t expect it to afford him much dignity, either.
But Samuel D. Hunter’s script, mounted on the Unicorn Theatre’s waiflike Jerome Stage, has a way of subverting your expectations. Much of that comes from the script’s complex depiction — and actor Phil Fiorini’s fearless portrayal — of Charlie, a morbidly obese gay man who teaches college writing courses online. (He uses a microphone but not a webcam, fearing his students’ reactions.)
At first, Charlie seems like the kind of fat guy people love to hate: undisciplined, unhygienic, apologizing pathetically and incessantly for his condition even as he deep-throats hoagies or laps grease from a bucket of fried chicken. But he’s also a thoughtful, sensitive companion to his friend and caretaker, Liz (Cinnamon Schultz), and a strong advocate for his students’ writing — so much so that he totes a favorite student essay on Moby-Dick around for good luck, like a rabbit’s foot.
Charlie’s curse, Hunter suggests, is being able to help everyone but himself. While he eats his way to an enormous early grave, he serves as the only emotional anchor for a sea of svelte dependents gone adrift. There’s his sadistic teenage daughter, Ellie (Daria LeGrand), as dysfunctional as the marriage that spawned her. There’s her mother, Mary (Manon Halliburton), a well-meaning but hapless drunk. And there’s a high-strung Mormon missionary, Elder Thomas (Jacob Aaron Cullum), hell-bent on saving Charlie’s gay, gluttonous soul.
Director Sidonie Garrett’s casting choices are beyond reproach. As Charlie, Fiorini delivers one of this season’s finest performances. He pulls himself off the couch with the red-faced strain of an Olympic weightlifter, gulping air with a lightheaded, sick-hearted wheeze. More affecting still is the way his voice changes when he teaches. With the flip of a microphone switch, Fiorini seems to lose 300 pounds. His face brightens, his shoulders relax, and his voice takes on a confident, winking air.
Cullum lends a similar precision to Elder Thomas, particularly in the first act. As superficial as his sermons may sound to audiences, Cullum commits to them with an earnest intensity that’s alternately hilarious and troubling. Schultz is commanding as Charlie’s chief enabler, Liz, though she rushes through some key moments. And Manon Halliburton feels out each corner of Mary, Charlie’s beleaguered ex-wife. An Act 2 confrontation between her and Charlie pulled me to the edge of my seat.
“She’s awful,” Mary says of their daughter.
“No,” Charlie says. “She just has a strong personality.”
I side with Mary. LeGrand is convincingly hateful as the daughter in question, but Hunter doesn’t give her much to work with. The Ellie we meet is chaotic evil incarnate, a push-pull nihilist who blogs nasty takedowns of the people she hates and either drugs or threatens to cry rape against the people she likes. It’s hard to fault LeGrand for giving the playwright what he wants, but the character comes off too flat for her late-play redemption to seem credible.
The Whale‘s single interior eases technical demands while amping up the apartment’s claustrophic feel. The Unicorn’s production team works cleverly within that constraint. Scenic and properties designer Bret Engle prescribes a tapered box set for Charlie’s dingy apartment, a museum of empty pie boxes. Dated appliances, grimy radiators and a saggy, threadbare couch complete the effect.
Georgianna Londré Buchanan’s costumes are impeccably detailed, but Charlie’s fatsuit is a well-engineered showstopper. The microbead “fat” accumulates in realistic rolls, bouncing organically without restricting Fiorini’s movements. Alex Perry’s lights effectively evoke subtle shifts in time and mood. And David Kiehl’s sound design layers whale song over gentle transition music, a choice that emphasizes the script’s repetitive (if at times murky) nautical metaphors.
Throughout, Hunter plays with allusions to Moby-Dick and the parable of Jonah. But the script’s most compelling themes go unstated. Charlie’s problem is all too visible: He carries his emotional baggage as physical weight. The other characters have outsized vices of their own — narcissism, contempt, weaponized regret — but don’t have to confront them as tangible, hulking realities. The resulting irony is thick as cream. Charlie has a fatalistic outlook on his flaws, but he alone seems to have the self-awareness to surmount them.
Most metaphors break down under scrutiny. But in the end, the play’s simplest simile holds. Charlie is a lot like the whale: perceptive, gentle — and an all-too-easy prey.
