COURTESY PHOTO
Benjamin Evett in the Gloucester Stage Company’s production of “Albatross.”
BY JACK BUTTEWORTH
GLOUCESTER — One of the most famous mariners of all has landed in this seaside community in a haunting mashup of classic literature, contemporary wit and timeless compassion.
Matthew Spangler and Benjamin Evett’s 2015 Boston production of “Albatross” celebrates and modernizes Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s epic 1798 fantasy poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and the play won awards for production and Evett’s performance.
This interpretation is as relevant to a post-Orlando massacre world as it was to Coleridge’s 18th century England. The creators know there’s a reason the mariner tells his tale. He knows this is a world of unexpected tragedy, a world where sometimes bad things happen for no reason. It’s ultimately a world in which God still loves us, if we can just realize it.
Fair warning: landlubbers and sailors are advised to move quickly if they wish to see it. The limited run ends Sunday. Then it sets sail for Edinburgh and eventually an off-Broadway run.
Spangler and Evett reimagine the Ancient Mariner as an eternal figure, doomed to tell his fantastic story to anyone who needs to hear it. The audience responds warmly to every word, even when the mariner contemptuously tells them to go home and look up an archaic word on Wikipedia.
The play is written as a 90-minute one-man show, which Evett tackles with gusto, sadness and everything in between. Is there a conversation between him and another character? He plays both sides. If there’s a storm, he roars. If the ship is becalmed in monster-infested waters, he gasps at the things that appear before him.
The creators love what they have done. Evett has the audience from the onset, when he uses a cell phone to determine his location and tries his near cross-eyed comic best to demonstrate the mariner’s “glittering eye.”
Director Rick Lombardo keeps it moving. The pacing is so tight that some in the audience may check their watches in amazement to see that the first hour has passed. Lombardo’s timber-shivering sound design underscores and intensifies the mariner’s predicaments.
Cristina Todesco’s set and Garrett Herzig’s filmed projections of fire and ocean transport us to a 1720 Bristol slum and the sea voyage the mariner is forced to take.
“Albatross” is a theatrical trip worth taking.
