Moon at the Bottom of the Ocean
by Bryn Magnus • Curious Theatre Branch at Chicago Dramatists
I loved this little, mysterious and well-executed play for its beauty.
The main character is a novelist who hires a private detective to monitor not his wife but a rival novelist who writes every morning in the coffee shop where his wife works. He wants to know his secret. Not his writing secret, because to paraphrase, “I can tell how he does everything” — no, he wants to know is how so much success has come to someone so talentless.
If I had a scale for rating art, it would start with “I don’t know how you did it” at the top and “I can tell how he does everything” at the bottom. It’s the worst.
But one big secret to success is obvious to the audience even if crazily hidden from our hero — letting other people read your work. His wife — who hasn’t read his novels in 15 years of marriage — points this secret out right off. But it remains elusive to our poor perfectionist writer throughout the play, till he’s forced into it. His wife wisely suggests he talk to the rival novelist directly, so as to demystify the destructive effect he has as a figment in his imagination. But he doesn’t take that advice either.
I loved how the play took the form of a romantic jealousy drama (and there were even whiffs of it turning into that), but was actually about the destructiveness comparative thinking produces when you’re trying to be an artist. The rationality of the PI’s brain, a nonbinary or trans Agent Cooper wonderfully interpreted by Julia Williams, could be read in the plotted movements of the actor’s body, like lines connecting stars to form constellations, and the audience unable to read them any other way. I loved the reversals when the PI finally crossed to the stage right area of the couple’s home, and the wife, played by Vicki Walden, ended up hiring him to read her husband’s novel for her.
The staging of the whole thing, directed by Jenny Magnus, was a Degas drawing of a ballerina, elegant but also geometric, with pauses and odd ball gestures remaining just long enough to evoke. When the PI finally read the novel (titled Moon at the Bottom of the Ocean), an entire scene was performed only by Julia Williams’ eyes and Vicki Walden’s body shrinking behind a chair. The drama was clear as a duel between what the PI read, and the wife’s fear that her husband’s life work — and therefore her own in support of him — would turn out to be “nothing.”
But the resolution seems to lie not in the discovery that the novel, of which there exist something like 500 drafts, is good, but that when the PI describes the story he read, you get the sense it’s his own story, not the novel, and the author is befuddled about where he got that — He proceeds to describe an entirely different story, even different characters. The beauty is in how the work is recreated in your reader’s mind, and that is the true success an artist can hope for.
All in all, I enjoyed Moon at the Bottom of the Ocean. I don’t know how they did it.
Moon at the Bottom of the Ocean by Bryn Magnus • Directed by Jenny Magnus • Performed by Jeffrey Bivens, Vicki Walden, Julia Williams • Curious Theatre Branch at Chicago Dramatists through Sept. 23, 2023 https://curioustheatrebranch.com/onstage/moon-at-the-bottom-of-the-ocean
