In 2009 veteran actor/director/playwright David Quicksall
premiered his adaptation of Herman Melville’s seminal novel, Moby-Dick, or The Whale into a
play for Book-It Repertory Theatre. After nearly 20 years, Vashon Repertory Theatre (VRT) is
reviving the play on the stage of Vashon Center for the Arts (VCA).

“It all started when VCAs Executive Director asked me if I had a play about a whale,” said VRTs
producing artistic director Charlotte Tiencken. Her answer, “The only whale play I know is Moby
Dick, and I know the playwright.”

VCA was about to mount the mobile skeleton of a whale — Springer – in their atrium, and ED
Allison Reid wanted a stage production equal to the Vashon community’s achievement of
assembling the whale bones to suspend from the Center’s ceiling.

Springer’s skeleton is mounted and undulating in the rafters of Vashon Center for the Arts’
atrium and VRT will stage Moby-Dick, or The Whale October 16 through 18 on the Center’s
mainstage.

Adapter David Quicksall will direct the play for VRT, with a hand-picked cast led by Seattle
legend Charles Leggett as Captain Ahab. In the seven years it took to adapt the epic tale from
Melville’s massive novel, Quicksall became a scholar of the times and of Melville himself.
“There is far more to this book than a simple action adventure about a bunch of guys hunting
down a big fish,” Quicksall notes. “What’s often lost is the book’s inward journey. It took me
eight drafts of the script to find those deep places –-the lower levels Melville called them.”

The diverse cast of 14 professional actors is currently in daily rehearsals. The set, designed by
Robin McCartney, will fill the VCA stage with the ill-fated Pequod and chill the audience with
images of the great white whale. Prop master Patti Curtis Hair is assembling seafaring artifacts
from the time including an antique ship’s bell. Lighting is covered by Robin Nettles and sound
by Nathan Wade. With costumes by Jocelyne Fowler and fight choreography by Jace Tucker,
audiences will be transported to 1850 when Melville’s characters were consumed by Ahab’s
obsession with the great white whale that took his leg.

The performance schedule at Vashon Center for the Arts is: Opening Night- Friday, October 16,
7:30 pm; Saturday, October 17, 2 pm and 7:30 pm; Sunday, October 18, 2 pm. A discussion will
follow the Sunday matinee

Tickets are available now at https://events.humanitix.com/moby-dick