For nearly three decades, the theater company Clubbed Thumb has nurtured some of the finest new plays to hit the New York stage, from the Tony-nominated What the Constitution Means to Me to the social-media-fueled Grief Hotel that played at the Public Theater last spring after an acclaimed premiere in the summer of 2023. Now another hit from Clubbed Thumb’s ’23 summer season, Abe Koogler’s Deep Blue Sound, has set up residence at the Public’s Shiva Theater. And it’s a welcome addition that typifies the company’s consistently smart approach to theater: sharply written works of intelligence and heart delivered in a no-frills package that typically runs under 90 minutes.
Deep Blue Sound follows a small island community in the Pacific Northwest who, in a wonderfully engaging opening where they talk over and around each other, express their concerns the orca pods that swam near their shores for generations but are suddenly MIA. While there are many surface similarities to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, this unnamed community is no Grover’s Corners. For one thing, the residents are a far more fractious lot who needle each other in humorously passive-aggressive ways and resist efforts to come together in the tight-knit way that we might expect.
They bristle at the town’s honorary mayor, Annie (Crystal Finn), and her earnest but ineffectual attempts to organize an investigation into the whales’ whereabouts. And they scoff at the local horse groomer, Les (Jan Leslie Harding), who lost the race for honorary mayor — perhaps because her platform focused on homelessness, which is not an issue on the island. But these neighbors’ lack of connection emerges in unlikely places, too, as when a terminal cancer patient, Ella (Maryann Plunkett), shuts herself off from old friends and needles her daughter (Carmen Zilles), who’s moved back home from a stalled artistic career in New York City to help with her care.
The sense of alienation is most dramatically realized in a hilariously executed caroling scene where the nine-person company bursts out into a cacophonous rendition of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” that speaks volumes about the townfolk’s inability to get to the bottom of the whale question — or to the personal troubles that they’re barely able to manage in their own lives.
Koogler introduces us to a lot of people — most cast members play more than one character — and so we seldom go very deep with any one narrative thread. And yet the performers, under Arin Arbus’s careful direction, bring a sometimes offbeat approach to the scenes that makes the characters distinctive by subverting our expectations about individuals we might be tempted to write off as yokels. Some standouts include Harding, who brings a quirky neediness to her middle-aged singleton that helps explain why her neighbors avoid her, and Finn, who perfectly captures the well-meaning but in-over-her-head vibes of Mayor Annie, whose obliviousness is perfectly captured when she learns that a local scientist moved away eight years ago (“Well that’s why I haven’t seen him!”). Finn also delivers a devastating deadpan performance as the mother of an unseen aspiring dancer of apparently minimal skills who keeps seeking approval for his efforts (though it’s not entirely clear that she’s not still Annie).
The heart and soul of Deep Blue Sound is Plunkett — and not just because her story is the saddest of the bunch. The veteran actress, a Tony nominee for last spring’s musical adaptation of The Notebook, brings a convincing groundedness to every role she takes — and here, she adds layers of depth to a woman who struggles to take control of her last days before taking advantage of her state’s Death With Dignity Act. Plunkett conveys the full range of Ella’s often-conflicting emotions — anger, fear, anxiety, self-pity — sometimes with just a telltale gaze off into the distance. “I’ve been resolutely avoiding positive thinking, I figure why start now,” she says with a sense of resignation that feels palpable. But even as she shuns her longtime friends, she also tries to forge a brand-new connection with the editor of the local paper (Mia Katigbak) in a series of conversations that, like many of the exchanges in the play, reveal a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of one or both sides.
Koogler’s brilliant play captures a fundamental contradiction at the center of modern living — our yearning to engage with those around us as well as our crippling fear of rejection. Deep Blue Sound is a perceptive parable for our divided age, a reminder that those who work up the gumption to try to save the whales may have a better target far closer to home: themselves. ★★★★☆
DEEP BLUE SOUND
Public Theater, Off Broadway
Running time: 90 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through April 5 for $65-$95
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