Orca: A One-Whale Musical
By Kyle Mazer
Waterfront Museum
Red Hook, Brooklyn
Oct. 20, 2023
It’s my experience, in my relatively short time in NYC, that whenever one must go to Red Hook, one is in for a strange affair. Nearly every neighborhood encompassed in the city’s sprawl has some charm to it — DIY Bushwick, the muted hipness of Ridgewood, the chaos of Midtown, the West Village’s seemingly endless line of overpriced bars and restaurants, the East Village’s effortless cool, and the Lower East Side’s knowingly performative avant-gardism. But Red Hook is a true anomaly. Arriving by car, as no trains run through the neighborhood, I stepped onto rain-slick cobblestone streets. Shipping containers blocked my view of the water, but the lap of the tide was audible. It was like being transported to an old fishing village, a strange, humble appended outcropping, a welcome jetty breaking the current of a metropolis hopelessly obsessed with itself.
A sense of community permeates the atmosphere in Red Hook. I can’t help but suppose it’s got something to do with its isolation from the rest of the city. Typifying this communal aura, Kyle Mazer, writer, director, and producer of Orca, hosted a small welcome reception before the world premiere of his play this past weekend.
On a long table in the back of the venue, the Waterfront Museum, a barge moored to the pier, pitching and yawing with the water’s ebb and rise, there was free pizza and candy for attendees who arrived early. The murmur of the crowd was serenaded warmly by a group of singer-songwriters trading a guitar and microphone round robin.
The whole thing was pleasant beyond expectation. Again, must be something about Red Hook. At theatrical performances elsewhere in the city, one is haunted by the possibility of occupying the “scene.” Everyone could be somebody one ought to know, judgement abounds, the show is rarely the point. But here, well, to put it simply, there wasn’t an ounce of self-consciousness in the room.
It’s a rare thing to see a show that’s only happening because the creators wanted it to happen. That’s the feeling I got, that this piece was being performed for the sake of itself, for the sharing of it with friends, and for the warmth of a sort of fellowship.
Orca: A One-Whale Musical is a strange piece of theatre. Mazer has concocted something completely original in content, though straightforward in form — which is by-and-large an excellent formula.
The audience is given the story of Gordon, the Rockstar Orca, from his “very, very beginnings to the very, very end.” The plot is simple: Young Gordon (portrayed by Dominoc Sullivan) wants to sing for himself to an adoring audience, not just as a voice in his pod’s much larger Orca-Stra. So he goes off on his own and … gets captured by Sea World, making him a star …
Over the course of the hour-and-change show, the audience was treated to unpredictable moments of participation, whether they were sudden games of “seal ball” or, in the case of one shocked, rosy-faced, lightly embarrassed woman, betrothal to Gordon himself. Deep questions of the value of individual subjectivity as a political and cultural metric were interrupted by bursts of increasingly well-performed, aquatic themed show-tunes — which were, in turn, interrupted by a janitor force-feeding sushi to Gordon.
Somewhere between the cloyingly earnest and the extraordinary there was silliness for silliness’s sake — and Orca was nothing if not unrepentantly silly.
It’s not a happy story, far from it. If there were any environmental or ethical concerns I expected to be evoked during a more or less musical, more or less one-man show about orcas, I’d have to say addiction, suicide, and depression were certainly low on that list. I’d prepared myself for something unbearably didactic. In my experience, that’s the usual case: Someone writes a play/story/poem about any subject with an ounce of political charge, during our age of environmental collapse and general upheaval, and it ultimately boils down to a punny PSA. Can’t imagine a ballet about polar bears that doesn’t plie, twirl, and spring over melting ice caps.
Not to say Orca wasn’t punny, it was. And not to say that it didn’t allude to political and environmental concern It certainly did. But! It was one of those magically bizarre and highly personal one-off firecracker performances that will most certainly have its audience asking two questions: 1)What did I just watch? 2) Where can I see more?
The answer to the second of which is — only in Red Hook.
