Mr. Hengst spent the summer searching for this year’s fall play and struggled to find the perfect one. He came across a licensed stage adaptation of Moby Dick, Herman Melville’s 1851 novel about Captain Ahab’s hunt for the white whale that took his leg. He liked the story and its large cast, but the script left him unsatisfied, so he went back to the novel to see what he was missing. About ten chapters in, he kept asking himself why the adaptation had cut so much of Melville’s material, and that question led him to a discovery. The book is in the public domain, and he could adapt his own version.
“I said to myself, ‘I’m going to try it,’” Mr. Hengst said. “If I don’t get it finished, I’ll just license the other one.”
He finished it, and in doing so he had to fit an 800-page novel into a single evening of theater. Melville gave him some help. Around the story of Ishmael, Ahab, and the crew of the whaling ship Pequod, the novel stretches into long chapters on whales and the whaling trade, three of them on the whale alone. “If you take just the story out of that, it’s a much shorter book,” Mr. Hengst said.
He held on to enough of those chapters to show the audience what life aboard the Pequod was like and what work the crew signed on to do, then shaped the rest of the script around the moments the story could not lose.
“The stage crew is planning on building Williams’ set design under the leadership of Fifth Former Alex Fenton, the new Stage Crew Captain. “
SAHIL MANJESHWAR ’28
The story moves between a ship and a few places on land, so Mr. Hengst needed a set that could change with the story. He found his partner in Nathaniel Williams, the new technical assistant in Centennial Hall, where the play will return this year after last year’s fall-play production in the Big Room. Williams is the show’s scenic designer. The two have planned one set that looks like a ship and can double as other locations, and they will leave the rest to the audience’s imagination.
The stage crew is planning on building Williams’ set design under the leadership of Fifth Former Alex Fenton, the new Stage Crew Captain. Fenton has worked on shows since eighth grade, including the program’s production of Les Misérables, so Mr. Hengst expects the crew to pick up right where it left off. The crew will also work with lighting designer Kelly Bertucci, who worked in technical theater at EA and has collaborated with Mr. Hengst before. Bertucci will get to use the new lighting instruments the school bought last year, which Mr. Hengst hopes will make the stage feel like open sea.
Under those lights, a cast of about 50 students will take the stage, about 20 of them in speaking roles. Only one Sixth Former auditioned this year, so Fifth Formers earned the three leading parts. Melville’s story still left a door open for the oldest students. On its voyage, the Pequod meets the captains of other ships, and each captain appears in one scene, so several Sixth Formers who could not commit to the full production took those cameo roles. Some of them even get monologues.
Once rehearsals begin, Mr. Hengst wants to stage the highly anticipated scene where the crew hunts whales and at last spots Moby Dick. He has ideas for the chase, though he plans to work it out with his actors. Mr. Hengst hopes the production sends people home curious enough to read the novel, and that they notice how his cast handles Melville’s language, which he described as heightened, though not quite Shakespearean.
“I’m excited for people to hear it and say, ‘These guys are really stepping into these roles,’” Mr. Hengst said.
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