FISHING
It’s a beautiful legend, and fitting to Fishing, the second of Michael Weller’s 1975 coming-of-age trilogy (the other, more popular parts are Moonchildren and Loose Ends). The playwright wraps his characters–friends gathered in a cabin in the Pacific Northwest–in their own redemptive fog.
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Most of Fishing’s three hours consists of dramatized group hallucinations. The only plot question here is whether Robbie and Bill will buy the decrepit fishing boat that Bill hopes will turn him into a deep-sea fisherman. It’s the latest of a lot of dreams that Bill has hatched and destroyed, like the farm he gave up after he shot a cow for not giving more milk.
The peyote peaks or crashes, the fog surrounds them with wonder, and the dialogue matches the weirdness: Robbie thoughtfully compares Shelly to a fully formed turd floating in the toilet; he tells Mary Ellen he wants to “suck her tits”; the guys have a strange game of Frisbee in the fog; and after Bill comes down from the trip, he tears a chicken apart (he had killed it earlier because it didn’t lay enough eggs) to signal his fury at Reilly’s pointless death.
Certainly Cactus’s excellent Waiting for Lefty had its share of excess, but the energy was successfully diffused amid Odets’s busy stage action. In Fishing, it just feels like a string of theatrical tantrums. If these folks would just pull back, they’d become a lot more real.
