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One would be hard-pressed to come up with a more incongruous image than that of the spiky-haired Anderson, with her digitally processed vocals and synthesized violin, sitting in on Melville Society meetings dissecting chapters of this behemoth of a book. But tackling major themes is nothing new to the keenly intellectual Anderson, whose "adaptation," "Songs and Stories From Moby Dick," premiered in Dallas last spring and is now the featured show opening the Brooklyn Academy of Music's renowned Next Wave Festival. Only partway through its national run, it is already considered by many to be Anderson's most ambitious and accomplished project to date.

Tour dates for "Songs and Stories From Moby Dick" Oct. 6-9, 12-15 Opera House Brooklyn Academy of Music Brooklyn, N.Y. Oct. 20-23 Royce Hall UCLA Los Angeles Oct. 26-30 Zellerbach Hall UC-Berkeley Berkeley, Calif.

Still, Anderson says, two decades of creating incisive, experimental one-woman shows ("Home of the Brave," "United States Live," "Stories From the Nerve Bible") and collaborations with modern-day visionaries such as Philip Glass, Allen Ginsberg, Brian Eno and Wim Wenders didn't prepare her for Melville and his notorious great white whale.

"The hardest thing about this project is the almost crippling fear that I wasn't doing justice to a book that I loved," Anderson confesses from New York during a recent phone interview. "And I've never been in that situation -- I've always been writing my own stuff. So I really was afraid that I was distorting things -- and I'm sure I am, in the end. But hopefully the angle that I'm looking at is interesting."

The initial inspiration for the production came two years ago, when Anderson was one of several artists asked to create a monologue about their favorite books for a DVD project aimed at teenagers. "[The producer] was going to have Spalding Gray do 'Catcher in the Rye,' and Robin Williams do a Dickens book, and Anna Deavere Smith was going to do 'Huckleberry Finn.' So I said I'd do 'Moby-Dick.'"

The then 50-year-old Anderson hadn't read the novel since high school, and remembered being bored by much of the whaling details and technical jargon. But when she read the book again, she says, she "fell in love with the language." The DVD project never panned out, but Anderson (forgive the pun) was hooked on the story. "I read it five more times in a row."

When Anderson told a friend about the project, he showed her a Bible that Melville purchased just before he began writing his literary masterpiece. Many of Melville's original pencil notes had been erased by his wife, with whom he'd had a less-than-perfect relationship. After an unsuccessful attempt to have the erased passages reconstructed, Anderson pored over the pages herself with a magnifying glass, hoping to find the inspiration behind Melville's tale.

In Isaiah 27:1, she found what she'd been searching for: "In that day the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea." Next to the verse was a check mark and a long squiggle.

"I thought, 'That's it!'" Anderson recalls. "The whale is his snake and the ocean is his garden, the place where he works out good and evil."

That someone with such a decidedly 20th century sensibility could truly appreciate Melville's 19th century novel might be surprising to some. But Anderson's storytelling style is uncannily similar to Melville's -- associative, imagistic, anecdotal. And despite its many biblical references, "Moby-Dick" was quite progressive, even by today's standards; when it was first published in 1851, it was not greeted favorably. Taking issue with how the novel jumped around from idea to idea, critics called it an "absurd" and "inartistic" book, "as clumsy as it is ineffectual," the "eccentricity in its style and in its construction" akin to "having oil, mustard, vinegar and pepper served up as a dish." It was only in the early part of this century that the book was rediscovered and hailed as a masterwork.

"I loved the crazy stories Melville told in the hundreds of voices that he invented -- historian, botanist, dreamer, chemist, librarian," explains Anderson. "I liked the jump-cutting around, and the way he was so free about saying, all right, now I'll tell you a story about these old bones, now I'll tell you a story about a pyramid and now I'll tell you a story about something else. And I thought, 'This is my guy.'"

Anderson insists the story has as much, if not more, resonance today: "It's about people working -- and that's pretty American. Another is that you're trapped on a ship with a captain who's out of his mind. And this is not an unfamiliar concept to Americans: The guy in charge is crazy, completely crazy. And the third is that it's about something that you look for, that you're never going to find."

Next page | Translating Melville's words into images