The square is empty, suspended, breathing. it is waiting.A deep, ancestral voice resounds from afar: twenty sailors, twenty men, twenty souls strike large wooden barrels on a moving wagon; the barrels are empty, rumbling greedily, waiting for the whale blubber.The air rips and vibrates. The rhythm punctuates the crew’s work. Reaching the square, the cart cleaves the pavement. The music booms.The audience witnesses the arrival of the wagon, which becomes a stage and within seconds is transformed into a feverish shipyard.Plank after plank, fishing ropes, lines and palanquins, the sailors begin to build the ship. Skeletal, unreal. It is our Pequod.Throughout the play there will be struggles, sudden fortunes, merry raids; characters emerge, stories are born.Over all weighs the shadow of Achab and his dark desire for revenge, the sailors’nightmare.With painstaking scheming the unexpected deed is accomplished. The ship becomes a whale. From guardian to monster.What it previously welcomed now terrorizes: the hull skeleton turns over and takes on the form of the fearsome leviathan.At last the two enemies will come face to face for the final confrontation: Achab and the white whale.Man versus nature, the prodigy, the unknown, the lost god, the fear that screamsfrom the abyss: Moby Dick.
