If you watch enough television, you’ve probably seen a reality show about a morbidly obese person so huge he is bed ridden, so corpulent that any attempt at personal hygiene is an exercise in humiliation.
Those shows don’t elicit compassion so much as scorn or, at the very least, relief. As viewers, we think, even if we are carrying around a few extra pounds, at least we aren’t that big.
For the past three weeks, Shuler Hensley has gotten a sense of what it’s like to be regarded that way. Each day, the Marietta-based actor, already a towering figure, pulls on a fat suit that transforms him into a 600-plus pound man. Next, he wrestles into a stained sweatshirt and pants. He lumbers onto the Playwrights Horizon stage in New York and maroons himself on a ragged couch on a set made up as a shabby living room. Then Hensley, the star of the new off-Broadway hit “The Whale,” waits for the audience to get its first glimpse of him. For the next hour and 55 minutes, it falls to him to move his viewers from a state of disdain to empathy.
The play, which opened on Nov. 5 to strong reviews, has already had its run extended to Dec. 6. The simple reading of the play — directed by Atlanta-native Davis McCallum and written by Samuel D. Hunter — is this:
It’s a about a man named Charlie who has lost the love of his life and is deliberately eating himself to death in his desolate suburban Idaho apartment. His contact with the outside world is limited to his work as an online tutor and occasional visits from his caretaker and friend, and his bitter, teenage daughter. He is well on his way to dying and knows it, even seems to be courting it. But Charlie also is trying to figure out why his partner died after being shunned by his Mormon elders.
The more complex reading of the play is that it’s about facing the truth of your life and making peace with it, said Hensley and McCallum.
“You’re initially shown this grotesque man, on whom everyone has a judgment,” said Hensley. “Even some of the characters in the play say, ‘You’re disgusting. You look bad. You smell bad.’ But, overtime, when his inner self is revealed, people become aware that he’s no more different than anyone and has the same needs, wants and desires.”
Hensley, who won the Tony award for his portrayal of Judd in the last Broadway revival of “Oklahoma,” played the lead earlier this year in “The Ghost Brothers of Darkland County,” put on by Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre. The musical was the much ballyhooed collaboration between Stephen King and John Mellencamp.
Hensley read for the role in “The Whale” in May. Like Judd and Joe in “Ghost Brothers,” the Charlie character of “The Whale” is the sort of outsider that appeals to Hensley Judged, maligned, perhaps an agent in their own destruction, but nonetheless very fragile at their core.
“Also there’s an ultimate need to reconcile with the people around him,” said Hensley, who is also an artist in residence at Kennesaw State University.
The theme of reconciliation – with self and others — was also a draw for McCallum, who, like Hensley, is a graduate of the Westminster School. But McCallum decided that the journey should be depicted in as raw a manner as possible. So the audience sees Charlie gorge on buckets of fried chicken, down 32-ounce jugs of soda, make his way around a floor littered with old pizza boxes. His every movement is labored.
“We decided early on that we didn’t want to sugarcoat this or pull any punches,” said McCallum, who directed “Spoon Lake Blues” at the Alliance Theatre’s Hertz stage last year. “We just thought that this is what this has got to be. But, by the end of the play, we are all slightly ashamed at having written this man off so easily at the beginning of the play.”
Even the stage is designed to suggest lives being consumed: The living room is encased in what resembles the belly of a whale. The 60-pound body suit that Hensley wears took six fittings to get right so that the fat undulates as though it were real. Hensley — whose mother, Iris, founded The Georgia Ballet — trained as a dancer and credits the experience with helping him navigate believably in such a cumbersome prosthetic. Emotionally, Hensley had to confront his own judgments about how a person could reach such a physical nadir.
“If you’re going to play something truthfully, you have to accept that character and being that character, so I went through stages of saying, ‘Oh my God, look how unbelievably gross I look in this suit,’” said Hensley. “Then I had to say to myself, ‘What if I was in that situation? How much guilt would I have that I’m putting not only myself through this but my family?’ These are issues that developed a solid undercurrent for these characters.”
By the end of the performance, McCallum said, any sense of fat person as sideshow has been obliterated. Instead, the audience is left to consider its own foibles and to ponder how it might begin to correct them before it’s too late.
“Ultimately, that empathy crosses over into the audience and it’s a really huge pay off,” said McCallum.
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