Moby Dick is too big to be a play. It is as America is: huge, multivalent, funny, pseudoscientific, bombastic, tragic, and not terribly interested in women. (Sorry, Hillary: It's not you, it's us.) Its 135 chapters are like citizens or waves—each a small, independent thing that's part of a whole so enormous, you can't hold it all in your mind. Fluke, an adaptation of Moby Dick by a New York company called Radiohole, is not a play. It is, as company member Maggie Hoffman wrote in an e-mail, "a collage that's barely a show."
It begins with Eric Dyer, an actor who seems like a sailor—bald and tough looking with a five-o'clock shadow and a blustery voice. He distills the first, funniest chapter of Moby Dick (I would like to resist quoting it; I cannot): "...whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball." Which Dyer growls out as: "I go fishing because I get so fucking fed up and depressed with this shit that I just have to get out of here." That's as literal as this adaptation gets. The rest is a jumble: two women sharing a joint in a tiny boat, actors painting their eyelids, a song by Rammstein, Ahab playing golf.
Fluke started as a tenuous metaphor Dyer found in an essay by Gregory Whitehead, something about Ahab being, as Dyer wrote in an e-mail, "a cosmic peg-legged receiver/transmitter picking up a nameless death rattle and rebroadcasting it to his crew." The metaphor was a good excuse to buy a new gadget that beams sound directly into your skull. (The device, called the Audio Spotlight®, was invented by soud prodigy Dr. F. Joseph Pompei, who was hired as an acoustic engineer at Bose when he was 16 years old.) "This technology," wrote Hoffman, "is used mainly by the military to hurt people or freak them out." The Audio Spotlight®, Dyer appended, is a civilian version, "not capable of keeping America safe."
Dyer also built boats for Fluke, small dories that wheel around onstage, based on the design of a rocking boat he saw at a cousin's house. One of the cofounders of Radiohole happened to be working in a plant that built NYC subway cars. Dyer and his friend snuck in one weekend to steal some time with the tools, building tiny boats for a tiny play in the corner of an enormous factory. 
