Bag&Baggage Productions of Hillsboro, Oregon, will tackle Orson Welles’ Moby Dick, Rehearsed, next month with a change in gender for the lead role.
In adapting Herman Melville’s 1,000 page seafaring novel to the stage, Welles created a play within a play with a running time of under two hours. Moby Dick, Rehearsed was originally staged during the summer of 1955 at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London and starred Welles, Christopher Lee, Joan Plowright and Patrick McGoohan.
“The basic idea of the Moby Dick, Rehearsed is that a group of Shakespearean actors is in rehearsals one afternoon before an evening performance of King Lear,” Scott Palmer, director of the production, told OregonLive.. “The lead actor arrives and hands out copies of a new script, a rehearsal experiment, based on Moby Dick. Scripts in hand, the actors transform the empty rehearsal space into the docks of Nantucket and the deck of the Captain Ahab’s ship, and then they start the hunt for the mythical Moby Dick.”
Bag&Baggage is hyping its production as the first in history to cast a woman in the lead role of Captain Ahab “continuing the company’s long history of giving women artists access to iconic dramatic and literary roles traditionally played by men.”
The company claimed it needed and secured the permission of Welles’ estate for casting a female lead, which seems to be a bit of a stretch. Production rights are handled by Samuel French Co. and the estate is not involved in casting decisions.
Kymberli Colbourne will star as Ahab in the production, which runs March 3 – 20 at the Venetian Theatre.
“As I anticipate the opportunity to be the first woman to play Ahab in Moby Dick, Rehearsed, I can honestly say I am equal parts excitement and terror – which, for me, is the best possible place to start any creative endeavor,” Colbourne said. “Ahab is a whale of a role, pun intended. Everything about him is huge; his obsession, his drive, his hubris,” Colbourne said. “I love the connections drawn in this script between Ahab and Lear – another larger-than-life, epic character. The marriage of the stories of these two giants of literature and drama underscores the universal experience of what happens when power, dominance and the need to hold on to it at all costs, blinds us.”
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