THEATER REVIEW
“The Whale”
Grade: B
Through June 14. 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays. $26-$33. Actor's Express (at King Plow Arts Center), 887 W. Marietta St. NW, Atlanta. 404-607-7469. www.actors-express.com.
Bottom line: Freddie Ashley’s superb performance balances an often overwrought drama.
During the last 10 or 12 years, Freddie Ashley has made a name for himself on the Atlanta theater scene primarily as a director. At Actor’s Express alone, where he was appointed artistic director in 2007, Ashley has mounted more than 30 productions.
In addition, he’s done occasional shows for other companies including Atlanta Lyric, Aurora, Dad’s Garage.
As an actor, though, Ashley still qualifies as something of an unknown variable. His most recent appearance – and the only one I’d ever seen before now – was portraying a rather bland Oscar Wilde in the Express’ 2011 drama “The Judas Kiss.”
Given that, nothing may prepare you for Ashley’s fairly astonishing performance as Charlie, a morbidly obese gay man coming to terms with the end of his life, in Actor’s Express’ current drama “The Whale.” (Interestingly, the part was originated off-Broadway by Marietta’s own Tony Award-winner Shuler Hensley.)
It’s an incredibly meaty assignment in more ways than one, not simply due to the physical challenges of playing the character in a massive “fat suit.” To be sure, Ashley inhabits the costume quite well, carrying himself with a painful authenticity.
What keeps it from being a glorified gimmick or sight gag, though, is how Ashley invests his role with a subtlety and shading that the rest of Samuel D. Hunter’s play largely lacks. Before long, we stop seeing Ashley in a fat suit and start seeing Charlie.
Secluded in his Idaho apartment where he teaches an online writing class, Charlie has been willfully eating himself to death in the years since he lost his partner, a former Mormon who conversely starved himself to death after a mysterious falling out with the church. A semblance of spiritual guidance arrives in the form of a young door-to-door missionary, nicely etched by Kyle Brumley.
There are issues elsewhere in director Heidi Cline McKerley’s supporting cast, possibly owing as much to the writing as anything else. Stephanie Friedman appears as Charlie’s estranged teenage daughter from a prior marriage, but it isn’t her fault if we couldn’t care less about such an unremittingly belligerent and hateful character. And Agnes Lucinda Harty, one of our finest actresses, seems off her usual mark here, overplaying the ex-wife and mother.
Most problematic is Tiffany Porter as Charlie’s longtime friend, a nurse who chastises others about their second-hand cigarette smoke but smokes around him herself; and admonishes him about his deteriorating condition, but brings him buckets of fried chicken.
Even so, whatever the show’s drawbacks, Ashley ultimately makes “The Whale” worthwhile.
