The Whale

Charlie, the morbidly obese protagonist in "The Whale", is eating himself to death. Literally. Some 600 pounds (he admits not to having weighed himself lately), the flesh cascades down his body in ever-widening concentric circles, settling above his legs like Jello held in check only by his well-worn sweat suit. It's as if he's about to burst; not outwardly as in some science fiction film; but inwardly, choking his body of what little life it has left.

He spends most of the running time of Samuel D. Hunter's compelling play stranded on his sofa in his dumpy apartment in the small Idaho town where he lives. Obviously he's in crisis, but he chooses not to take measures to help himself. Saying he doesn't have health insurance, he refuses to go to a hospital. Instead he watches television while compulsively downing fried chicken, Good and Plentys and meatball subs. His main source of human contact is with Liz, a nurse and his best friend; and the students he teaches expository writing online. To them he is just a voice -- he never turns the camera on.

But a health emergency leads him to realize that he's much worse than he thought -- his death is imminent -- and he sets out to make amends with his estranged teenage daughter Ellie, a girl so nasty she's alienated everyone around her. Bribing her with promises to write her papers to keep her from flunking out of high school and to give her a considerable amount of savings, Ellie agrees to visit him every day without the blessing of her mother, Mary. Charlie left Mary 14 years before when he realized he was gay and had fallen in love with one of his students. Ellie was just two years old at the time, but claims she remembers watching her father blubber on the floor. She's been bitter ever since.

But those expecting some sort of cathartic reunion should just stay home and watch Lifetime -- Hunter explores something tougher: can Charlie forgive himself for what he has done to his body and those around him? It's a tough call because not only does Charlie hate himself, but so do those around him. Liz refers to him as "that fat disgusting gay thing" and Ellie says he makes her sick.

The reason why Charlie is eating himself to death has little to do with an eating disorder; instead he been doing so out of grief. Alan, his partner, died a few years before when he starved himself to death. Now in a Bizarro turnaround, Charlie hopes to achieve the same goal through the opposite of means. There's dark humor in this, which Charlie is aware of; but the beauty of Hunter's writing is that there's empathy as well. He's a swelling mass of pain seeking some kind of redemption. Can he find it with Ellie -- a girl who expresses her anger in vicious blog postings? Or with Liz, whose relationship with Charlie can best be described as passive/aggressive?

Also in Charlie's orbit is Mary, his ex-, who hasn't seen him for years and has no idea he's ballooned to the nearly immobile mass on the couch; and Elder Thomas, a Mormon missionary out to save Charlie. For his part, Charlie has his own reason to befriend Elder Thomas -- perhaps through him he can solve just what drove Alan to kill himself.

What makes "The Whale" so arresting is how shrewdly Hunter brings the audience into Charlie's psyche. At first he's alarming -- a persona familiar from reality television or news reports that elicits a combination of curiosity and fear; but Hunter carefully makes Charlie's pain viable. His mantra is "I'm sorry" -- an apology that infuriates Liz (and the audience), but as the play progresses it becomes clear that his shame for being gay is what has crippled him. He has internalized the homophobia that drove Alan to kill himself and gives it grotesque physical reality.

Hunter infuses the play with literary references -- "Moby Dick" and the Biblical story of Jonah and the whale -- that give it a larger context, as well as cleverly reference Charlie's vocation as a teacher. Even in his bloated state, he continues to find hope in his students and in Ellie, whose mean girl characterization borders on caricature. He's something of the eternal optimist, which John Kuntz underscores without slipping into bathos. Kuntz, whose small head appears to float above the mounds of flesh beneath it, gives an incredible performance -- both physically taxing and emotionally viable. His helplessness is palpable, but so is his facility for unconditional love, both for easy-to-loathe Ellie and the often nasty Liz. He even makes peace with the clueless 19-year old Elder Thomas, who has a strange back-story of his own; and with Mary, whose resentments are still raw years after their parting. Kuntz pushes in ways that are both uncomfortable and revealing -- wheezing, coughing and sweating with an alarming realness. What he does best, though, is reveal the sweet, once happy man lost under the rolls of fat.

David R. Gammons production masterfully fits the contours of Hunter's vision. The look of the production (sets by Cristina Todesco, lighting by Jeff Adelberg and costumes by Gail Astrid Buckley) is abstracted -- only a sofa on a platform surrounded by the ever-growing litter brought by Charlie's over-eating. Even the space beneath the platform looks like a dump with crumpled boxes, cartons and bottles filling the width of the proscenium. David Remedios' sound design (filled with labored breathing, wheezing and the sounds of the sea) gives the production an almost surreal dimension.

Gammons also oversees a terrific ensemble. Georgia Lyman is tough and tender as Liz, who, it turns out, has her own vendetta against the Mormon church. She doesn't make her troubled character sympathetic, rather approaches her with a deep honesty of someone caught in an emotional vice. Josephine Elwood captures Ellie's self-absorption and seemingly limitless resentment with surprising clarity, bringing surprising depth-of-feeling to a character that could have easily walked out of a bad teen movie. Maureen Keiller brings a world-weariness to Mary, a woman who has all but given up on life and happiness; and Ryan O'Connor mixes self-delusion and a zealot-like determination as the Mormon who holds the key to the mystery that has driven Charlie into his downward spiral.

There's a voyeuristic quality to the central premise of "The Whale" that has a tabloid appeal, but what Hunter does so well is make Charlie a viable, tragic figure. To make this happen, John Kuntz, wet-eyed and sweaty, understands that by drilling down into Charlie's pain, he creates a vivid and mesmerizing person in emotional and physical free-fall.

"The Whale" continues through April 5, 2014 at the Roberts Studio Theatre in the Stanford Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont Street, Boston, MA. For more information visit the SpeakEasy Stage Company website.