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Where’s Willy? Abe Koogler’s Deep Blue Sound
The orcas have vanished, and a Pacific Northwest community is puzzled.
Halfway inside their characters and dipping in and out of various secondary roles, the actors briskly encourage us not to worry too much about who’s who — “Just give up now … If you get mixed up, let it go.” They weave and bob around one another like fish in a school, somehow in unison, yet each one individually darting forward or receding as the collective flow demands. Her tittering eagerness to tell us about her diary-writing great-great-grandmother, who was one of the “original settlers” on the island, bursts into full hilarity when she announces this ancestor’s name: “EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY … But not the one you’ve heard of.” Meanwhile, her hopeful, horse-talk-filled communications with her unseen pen pal are equal parts funny and gutting. A moment when Mayor Annie loses it at Les during a town meeting that quickly spirals toward absurdism and a scene late in the play in which Gary, spookily lit, creeps across the stage while cooing to the island’s population of stray wolf-dogs, coaxing them to follow him into the woods, both come off as flourishes without follow-through — dashes of the surreal for spice rather than for deep-seated dramaturgical need.
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