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Moby Dick: A Review
On Deck
Action, stage right
I attended a performance of the Mixed Magic Theatre’s production of Moby Dick: Then and Now Friday night at the Wickford Town Beach. Live theater on the beach with sails in the sunset and a calm surf serenading the theater goers. An incongruous, peaceful scene for this jarring setting of Melville’s great novel Moby Dick adapted for the stage by the Mixed Magic Theatre’s Ricardo Pitts-Riley.
Pitts-Riley’s production, Moby Dick: Then and Now contains a play within a play where the crew of the good ship Pequod is juxtaposed with the crew of an inner city gang of minority youth doing battle with their own Great White.
The young actors playing the inner city gang put in a phenomenal performance. In fact all the actors put in strong performances. The action moves back and forth between the crew of the whaling ship and the young gang crew.
Ostensibly a symbol of cocaine, heroin, and the drug culture, the sub-text of the Great White these young gang members hunt for revenge could also be read as "White Culture", which holds out the promise of wealth, status, fame and fortune, and the American Dream, only to pull it back just out of reach time and time again as their own narrow outlook and the moneyed, corporate interests co-opt their culture and keep them on the outside looking in.
Nowhere is this made more clear than the scene where the youngsters are stranded downtown (while havoc is being wreaked in their Hood by a rival gang) and various hucksters come on to them: a lawyer, a white rapper celeb, a shoe company exec, a police chief whose wife is a social worker, who all join in, in a chorus of something like “There’s big money in this Great White biz.”
Of course it is a mistake to characterize the predominant culture as White (as in race) when the predominant culture (the world over) has no color: the predominant culture is economic: the color of money.
Yet the point is well taken. A powerful message read both ways.
Mixed Magic Theater remains an under-recognized, under-appreciated local treasure. I learned about this theatre troupe by accident: a carpenter I work with in my business has a second life as a thespian. He likes to go by the moniker “Jim Dawg”, but I just know him as Jimmy. He appeared as an extra in Armistead and productions of TV shows like The Brotherhood, and he is a member of the actors union. But it was as a member of Mixed Magic Theatre, under the tutelage of Pitts-Riley, that he blossomed into an actor.
Last summer I watched their production of Shakespeare’s
The Taming of the Shrew, in Pawtucket -- it was wonderful.
Mixed Magic Theater is a non-profit arts organization well deserving of any grant money they receive: if you don’t believe me, go see these wonderful kids and their mentors act their coal black and lily white asses off.
Before you shell out $15 for that next, must have CD, think twice, and send that money to the Mixed Magic Theatre.
I’d like to bring the Mixed Magic Theatre’s production of Moby Dick: Then and Now to Billy Taylor Park courtesy of the Greater Camp Concerned Citizens. It’s time for a little community theatre. To do so we will need donations, for I will not ask them to perform for us for free. It costs money for lighting, staging, and other production costs.
We will be in touch for donations. Anyone interested in helping bring this about contact me through the website
JohnTwomey
Posted at July 23, 2007 12:54 AM