“Charlie cherishes one piece of Ellie’s writing; an eighth-grade book review of Moby Dick, in which she wrote,
‘I was very saddened by this book, and I felt many emotions for the characters. And I felt saddest of all when I read the boring chapters which were only descriptions of whales, because I knew that the author was just trying to save us from his own sad story, just for a little while.’
Charlie clings to this evidence of Ellie’s sensitivity, of her ability to imagine the suffering of others, like Ishmael to the coffin.”
– John Lahr,
‘Supersize’, a review of Samuel D. Hunter’s disturbing play,
The Whale, in the Nov. 19 issue of The New Yorker. (2012)