Watch a trailer for the show.
Yngvild Aspeli and Norwegian theater company Plexus Polaire take on the white whale of adaptation in their rendition of Moby Dick. Learn more about the company.
Office Hours: Coming Soon
Get Into It
Get Thee to the LIbrary
Recommended readings to get you in gear for the show.
Jonathan A. Cook, Inscrutable Malice: Theodicy, Eschatology, and the Biblical Sources of “Moby-Dick.” Cornell University Press, 2022.
Meredith Farmer and Jonathan Schroeder, editors, Ahab Unbound: Melville and the Materialist Turn. University of Minnesota Press, 2022.
Wyn Kelley and Christopher Ohge, A New Companion to Herman Melville. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2022.
Richard J. King, Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A Natural History of Moby-Dick. University of Chicago Press, 2019.
Peter Riley, Whitman, Melville, Crane, and the Labors of American Poetry: Against Vocation. Oxford University Press, 2019.
Aaron Sachs, Up from the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times. Princeton University Press, 2022.
Viola Sachs, The Myth of America: Essays in the Structures of Literary Imagination. De Gruyter Mouton, 2019.
Read All About It
French Culture | 2018
Interview with Puppeteer Yngvild Aspeli
“The relationship between the actor and the puppet are central in my work, and I am especially interested in the space that appears when the two different levels of presence meet.”
Toronto Star | 2022
Review by Aisling Murphy
“One gets the sense Melville himself might have appreciated the production.”
Norwegian Arts | 2019
NA Meets: Puppetry company Plexus Polaire
“When making a performance I work on how to translate the text into a visual language; to transform the story into a physical experience.”
From the Archives
A conversation with Amy Trompetter and John Heginbotham, who brought large-scale puppets to NYU Skirball in 2018 with Fantasque.
Extra Credit: Other Ahabs
Moby Dick has been inspiring artists and admirers of Melville’s work since its publication, and has been adapted into every genre as new generations of artists find their own white whales.
Matt Kish’s book Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page first started as a blog. You can read the book (backwards) on the blog, starting with page 552, or see excerpts on his website. This is page 548:
Ray Bradbury’s Leviathan 99, itself a science fiction novel riffing on Melville, has been adapted several times into a radio play.
And you can see how you would fare against the beast in this Moby-Dick card game, called Moby-Dick, or, The Card Game (sadly, out of print).
