Seagoing adventure a bumpy ride
To find an entrance scene as majestic as Captain Bucko’s seminautical one in “Bucko: Whaleman!” you’d probably have to look outside the theater, to a royal procession.
In and of itself, this whaler’s vehicle isn’t that impressive. Designed by Joan Howard, it lugs along some ignoble but whimsical stowaways: seaweed and barnacles, even a starfish. More crucially, it could fare no sea. Bearing the weight of just two actors, Ross Travis as the captain and Amelia Van Brunt as a variety of crew members, the vessel whinnies in pain, threatening to snap in two with each shift of weight.
But how can one not owe fealty to a boat on wheels improbably careening across
Hyde Street Pier, with steering capabilities that afford great swoops before the audience? (I paid homage to this Antic in a Drain production on Friday, June 16.)
On its own, the national park is an impossibly grand setting, with bay views among our region’s best. Adding a mobile (if only on land) ship to the pier’s menagerie of anchored ones only amplifies its native gull squawks and sea lion barks, its wave crashes and creaks of actual floating watercraft. You wish the preening Travis could simply parade his ship back and forth before us for hours, a la a car show for 19th century sloops.
Sometimes, the rest of “Bucko” approaches the splendor of this opening, as when Van Brunt channels the late Don Rickles to heckle the crowd before the show starts, or when the comic pair indulge in vulgarities worthy of a true sailor. In one of the play’s best exchanges, a speech-slurring (speech-mashing) Van Brunt schools her captain in the fine art of wooing, comparing a woman’s body to that of a farmer’s prized piglet. She makes each teat a mechanical knob capable of eliciting, with just the right twist, a very particular pleasure.
In his testament to life at sea, Bucko is poetic, using action verb-driven language we contemporary theatergoers don’t get to hear often enough. “I am no land tiller. No earth plodder. No grass trimmer. No tree pruner,” he says. “I am a water slicer. A wave climber. A sea survivor.” To accentuate the metaphors, Travis deploys his formidable circus skills. Making a Chinese pole of the ship’s mast, he carves the air with an array of appendage combinations.
Yet for the first few scenes of the show, which Travis and Van Brunt created in collaboration with director Stephen Buescher, it’s hard just to tell that Van Brunt is supposed to be playing many different characters. Only with the script’s contextualization do a first mate, a cook, Nordic lackeys and so many more emerge, when crisper physicality and more probing choices about who each person is could have done that work from the play’s beginning.
The two spend so much time shouting — at the sea, at whales, at each other — that soon nothing seems worth shouting about. The show’s overarching narrative of an isolated, ambitious captain’s descent into greed feels drawn from stereotype immemorial. And that ridiculous vessel, so commanding upon its entrance, soon becomes a constraint on its actors, a too-small stage that restricts their movement on an otherwise capacious pier and distances them from us.
Even in its longueurs, though, “Bucko” offers recompense. There is always the bridge and the sunset, the salty air and the real moored ships, whose constant bobbing up and down might make you believe, for a moment, that it’s you who’s at sea.
In his testament to life at sea, Bucko is poetic, using action verb-driven language we contemporary theatergoers don’t get to hear often enough.