A cruel social joke around the play is that upon first seeing Charlie (Shuler Hensley), one might think that Hunter’s title refers to his protagonist. Charlie, an online English instructor, is morbidly obese (costume designer Jessica Pabst has crafted an eerily convincing padded costume to make him appear to be around 600 pounds), and doing himself no healthy favors. He rarely leaves the couch we see center stage of the Idaho one-bedroom apartment in which he lives. Charlie lives alone, but spends most of his time connected to a variety of people, mostly the students he instructs – only via audio, so they have no idea of his size – and his nurse neighbor, Liz (Cassie Beck), who enables him as much as she cautions him about his unhealthy habits.

Hunter re-teams with director Davis McCallum, who helmed his last work, A Bright New Boise, which was as close to a perfect play I’ve ever seen on the New York stage. Both works are uniquely stylized ruminations on what both family and faith can do for people, and do to people. Charlie still aches from the loss of his lover Alan, who slowly lost his will to live out of Mormon guilt over his homosexuality. And while Charlie seems to feel that he is on borrowed time (every movement and breath requires a herculean amount of energy from Charlie, which Hensley manages with painstaking grace), he creates a de facto family by reaching out to people from both past and present, in the form of his nasty estranged daughter Ellie (Reyna de Courcy), from an early marriage to Mary (Tasha Lawrence), and to Elder Thomas (Cory Michael Smith), a nineteen-year-old Mormon missionary who ended up at Charlie’s door and keeps getting invited back.

Whale could easily show the erasure marks and indentations of an emerging playwright in a less visionary writer’s hands, but Hunter’s work, set over the course of five days and with multiple nods to Melville and the Biblical story of Jonah, never feels overly tidy nor pretentious. He even manages to find dramatically necessary ways to provide exposition, thanks to his skill with dialogue. McCallum guides a superb ensemble to fully-realized, humane performances. His supporting cast skirts cardboard characterizations: on paper, Ellie comes off as insensitive and nasty to the point of disbelief, but de Courcy creates an understandably wounded modern teenager who knows how to use language as a weapon. She often provides needed humor for the play, allowing it to bend but never break. Smith ensures that Elder Thomas, a contemporary Ishmael, never feels like plot contrivance, shading in youthful confusion and naïveté instead of caricaturing it. Beck and Lawrence, too, show complicated connections to Charlie. These are all real people, suffering but surviving, and finding their own ways to have questions answered.

And then there’s Hensley, a force of astonishing physical and emotional bravery that, well, grounds the play at every well-constructed turn. Earning, never courting sympathy, the sight of Charlie reminds of something that this character, himself an English grad student, has always known: that everyone, regardless of appearance or (mis)fortune or decisions, has a story worth being told.

The Whale

Peter Jay Sharp Theater, 416 West 42nd Street, Manhattan, (212) 564-1235. www.playwrightshorizons.org. Through Dec. 2.

Photo Credit: Patricia Voulgaris

Robert Warner has been the master printer for 17 years at Bowne & Co Stationers, a modestly sized stationery store and printing press that is part of the South Street Seaport Museum.

This piece of New York City history stands on cobble stoned sidewalks, giving New Yorkers and tourists alike a little taste of the 19th century, with its hand-cranked printing presses. Back when printers were tradesmen, not machines hooked up to computers, press printing was a skill and a trade essential to Downtown, which has always been a printing, publishing and finance district.

What does Bowne & Co offer the Downtown community?

This community that’s down here is unlike any other community. There’s a school and then there’s all these businesses and then there’s all these old buildings, which some people have inhabited and restored—there is a whole sense of renewal and community in this part of the city. This is where New York begins. 

We have to learn from our history, preserve it and actually embrace a neighborhood so many people have passed through, like [Herman] Melville and [Walt] Whitman and Joseph Mitchell.

What do people expect when they walk in or pass it by?

When people enter the shop, oftentimes they say, “Oh, it reminds me of the way my grandparents’ house smells.” And I’ll ask, “Well, were they printers?” and they say, “No, it’s the wood.” I’m so used to the smell of the wood after 17 years that I barely notice it.

[When I first started here] I just loved walking in and smelling the ink and the oils. There were two women in the back printing and there was a sense of industry and tradition. I want to continue to convey that. I like people to have an experience when they visit here that they wouldn’t have in any other store.

Why does printing matter?

This neighborhood was the printing and publishing district for many, many years. And as much as we’d like to think that we’re a paperless society, we still rely on paper now. Ink on paper is all the more beautiful when it’s letterpressed because it leaves a kiss on the paper and an impression on the page.

I am a firm believer that humans need the human touch, which is what Bowne & Co. Stationers does. You can buy a handmade $3 card here—why spend $4.50 at a Duane Reade on a glossy American Greetings card?

Photo Credit: Patricia Voulgaris

Do you have any letterpress workshops coming up to get some people coming in? You have to pass on the printing tradition eventually, right?

Occasionally I do workshops. The next one will be letterpress collage, and I’d like to do it weekly. Workshops sound so serious, like you have to work. I just want people to experience paper and composition. It’s not really playtime either, it’s an assemblage, but people don’t really know the word assemblage.

I could consider the next generation, take on an intern, pass on my knowledge. I’ll do what I can, but being here, unlocking the door and having normal business hours, people know and depend on me to come here. I’m not expecting millions of people—I don’t know if I want a global network. I think Downtown is enough.

What’s the appeal of an antiquated letterpress, especially in this technological age where everything is on a screen?

[The letterpress] is hand-operated and hand set, so every letter is an individual body of type. You can print 500 copies from one letterpress and 200 of them might be very similar, but the beauty of it is that they’re never going to be exactly the same. It’s the difference between something that is hand-embroidered and something that is machinemade.

What’s beautiful about printing on letterpress is the ability of the viewer to actually see a hand process. I think more and more, the way the public views a computer screen or a tablet, people long to actually feel paper and run their finger across it. I know that the Kindle is very important because people are reading it and it’s accessible, but I’ve noticed that when people pick up paper or books, they run their finger across it and you see them taking it in. People will always hunger for something that has a texture to it.

Bowne & Co. Stationers, 211 Water St. (betw. Fulton & Beekman Sts.), 212-748-8651

On Thursday, November 10 in Zuccotti park there will be a lull in the drum circles and guitar playing around 3 p.m.  Occupy Wall Street, in coordination with the Housingworks Bookstore Cafe, has organized a live group reading of Melville’s short story, Bartleby the Scrivener.

Little did Mellville know that his short stories would provide fodder for a movement that occured a century and a half after the original story was published.  However, the story could not be better suited to the cause.  The narrator, a Wall Street lawyer is confronted with an impertinent employee who’s mantra becomes “I would prefer not to.”  The lawyer quickly finds that “nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.”

The Occupiers will take turns reading from the short story and have invited the general public to join in.  They have also intentionally placed the event in the middle of the work day.

Occupy has permeated far and wide.  It was only a matter of time before they came for you, Melville.