Abe Koogler’s ‘Deep Blue Sound’

At the risk of sounding like a tourist who just finished a harbor cruise on a dull day: I thought there’d be more whales. I missed the premiere of Abe Koogler’s Deep Blue Sound at Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks festival (always abundant with riches) in 2023, and when the show announced a return at the Public Theater this year, its description rippled with suggestion: “On an island in the Pacific Northwest, the community gathers to address the disappearance of the local orca pod.” It wasn’t, I suppose, actual whales I expected so much as their centrality, even in absence, to Koogler’s story. But Deep Blue Sound is, in its DNA, a play of glimpses, of overlapping, unfinished melodies. It doesn’t spin around a fixed point — instead, it roams like a visiting photographer, capturing fragments of interaction, sometimes in focus, sometimes blurred along the edges. Koogler needs a reason to wander among the population he’s created on a little nameless island in the Puget Sound, and the islanders’ shared concern for their missing whales provides one. But, in ways both beautiful and only intermittently fulfilling, Deep Blue Sound is much more about the loosely woven, eccentric fabric of community than it is about the act of coming together — either, from a writerly perspective, around a theme or, from a character standpoint, around a cause. Koogler is interested in human smallness, in our cosmic lack of control, and the softness of his gaze can render Deep Blue Sound’s exploration of existential uncertainty wonderfully funny and affecting in some moments, diffused and aimless in others.

But boy, does it start out strong. On a simple carpeted platform given the flavor of a town-council meeting by the scenic-design collective Dots (a lectern, a microphone, a crescent of mismatched wooden chairs), eight of the play’s nine actors face us, seated, as the show begins. In a rush of earnest energy and expertly calibrated ensemble rhythm, they introduce themselves. “I play Ella, who’s dying of cancer,” says Maryann Plunkett (returning to the role that won her an Obie). “I play John, her dear friend who doesn’t know that,” adds Arnie Burton, as Miriam Silverman chimes in, “I play Mary. The three of us are friends, and I just split up with my husband, Chris.” On the other end of the row, Armando Riesco speaks up huskily: “… Who’s not doing so good right now. I play Chris.” In these opening moments, under the precise yet deceptively casual baton of Arin Arbus’s direction, the music of Koogler’s script finds its fullest, most vital expression. Halfway inside their characters and dipping in and out of various secondary roles, the actors briskly encourage us not to worry too much about who’s who — “Just give up now … If you get mixed up, let it go.” They weave and bob around one another like fish in a school, somehow in unison, yet each one individually darting forward or receding as the collective flow demands. Provincial judgments and resentments peek their nosy heads out, then close their shutters again; intimacy and passive aggression babble like intersecting creeks; everyone interrupts everyone, and on they all tumble together.

It’s a gorgeous overture, a wry, effervescent fanfare for these common men and women, and Arbus’s ensemble doesn’t miss a beat. We both learn what we need to learn and are swept delightfully along by rivulets of tone and detail: Annie (Crystal Finn) is the “mayor” (“Symbolic mayor,” says Silverman’s skeptical islander, “There’s no powers”); Ali (Carmen Zilles) has moved back home from New York to care for her mom, Ella; Joy Mead (Mia Katigbak) edits the local paper; and squirrely, lonely Les (“Leslie for long,” says the flawless Jan Leslie Harding with an awkward half-giggle) grooms horses and writes pining letters to her pen pal while the rest of the town rolls their eyes. “We are all worried about those whales,” Mayor Annie assures us, but getting this group to stick to a topic is like trying to get water to stick to a duck. Soon we’ve heard about the Strawberry Festival, the Island Humane Society, “Homeless Gary” (“let’s not condescend,” chirps Annie) who wanders the island offering to cut wood for folks (Ryan King eventually appears as this chainsaw-wielding enigma), and the grisly death of Bob Hartman, who was found partially eaten by his dog. “The dog ran away toward the woods,” says Silverman’s islander, “and some people think” that it mated with a wolf, previously escaped from a wolf sanctuary run by “a very strange woman named Star,” and now there’s a stray-dog problem on the island — “little dogs that resemble wolves,” says Zilles’s islander conspiratorially, that “can be seen, sometimes, at night, in the woods, with their eyes.”

This kind of extended concerto of meandering communal patter can’t last forever, but I missed it when it ended and Koogler rounded the corner into the play proper. “Emerging … rising … cresting … falling” is how Silverman’s islander dreamily remembers watching the whales surface out in the sound, and that pattern makes itself felt in the tides of the play’s long opening salvo. Once the group breaks up and Koogler moves into a series of character encounters — duets, trios, a few solos — you can feel him attempting to weave a structure by treating scenes the way his introduction treated lines of dialogue: They’ll overlap, cut each other off, hang unfinished, wander and return. It’s elegant in theory if somewhat less rewarding in practice. “Let’s do a general overview of us, circle back to the whales. Okay?” Zilles’s islander has suggested during the preamble, and, in macrocosm, Deep Blue Sound does pretty much that. It roves among its characters with the question of the orca pod’s disappearance serving less as a driving narrative urgency and more as a sporadic means to regather individuals into the same space. It’s entirely possible — probable, even — that this is exactly what Koogler wants, that his play is less interested in how people solve problems than in how, with the best will in the world, they consistently fail — how they float apart from collective action, each into the undertow of their own worries and priorities, their own insular lives. As an idea, that’s compelling, yet scene to scene, the play’s grip on us also ebbs and flows.

As Les the wistful horse groomer, Harding gives life to some of the show’s finest moments. A collaborator with Richard Foreman and Mac Wellman, she brings pedigreed weirdness to the production, a way of speaking and of inhabiting a character body that’s at once riveting in its meticulous oddity and completely poignant. Her tittering eagerness to tell us about her diary-writing great-great-grandmother, who was one of the “original settlers” on the island, bursts into full hilarity when she announces this ancestor’s name: “EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY … But not the one you’ve heard of.” Meanwhile, her hopeful, horse-talk-filled communications with her unseen pen pal are equal parts funny and gutting. She’s got a lock on a particular kind of artfully balanced strangeness while, elsewhere, Deep Blue Sound strays into that popular cul-de-sac of contemporary playwriting, quirk for quirk’s sake. A moment when Mayor Annie loses it at Les during a town meeting that quickly spirals toward absurdism and a scene late in the play in which Gary, spookily lit, creeps across the stage while cooing to the island’s population of stray wolf-dogs, coaxing them to follow him into the woods, both come off as flourishes without follow-through — dashes of the surreal for spice rather than for deep-seated dramaturgical need.

Stronger are the play’s smaller moments of human risk, of putting something out there with no certainty about where it might lead. Koogler has an ear for quietly shattering letdowns, as when Ali calls her ex in New York and floats the idea of coming back — tiny, awful shifts in Zilles’s face and voice tell us everything as, after a pause, she hurries onwards with, “No, that makes sense. I get that” — or when Ali’s mother, Ella, makes an unexpected request of a new acquaintance. Ella, who’s hiding the severity of her situation while also making plans for an assisted death, has enlisted the local editor, Joy Mead, to help her write her own obituary. But she flips every meeting into interviewing Joy — cooking her dinner, listening to her stories of the time she spent in a cult, eyes wide and a “That’s fascinating” always on her lips. Plunkett, so adept at channeling great pain through layers of gauzy lightness, reveals the depths of the character’s fear and avoidance when Ella asks if Joy will be present for her death. The editor stiffens. “Don’t you have people who know you?” she says, and the wrecking ball of disappointment swings straight at Ella’s chest.

“At no point in my life have I had certainty,” says Zilles — perhaps as Ali, perhaps as simply another islander — during a short solo snippet of a scene. “At every moment I’ve been plagued by doubt, at every moment I feel as if others are so clear on what they want to do, as if they’re so clear and I am always like what the hell should I do I mean is this clear to other people about what the hell to do about anything?” It’s a little scream from the center of the play. The islanders can no more control whether the whales come or go than Ella can control her cancer or Mayor Annie can corral a group of quibbling, digressing neighbors into decisive action. It’s a delicate task to write a play that is, in certain deep senses, about dispersal and diffusion. In its pursuit of those ideas, Deep Blue Sound doesn’t always cohere, but its eddies and tidal pools are still full of treasures.

Deep Blue Sound is at the Public Theater, presented by Clubbed Thumb, through March 29.