Crystal Finn, Brittany K. Allen, and Armando Riesco in Deep Blue Sound. Photo: Marcus Middleton

I suppose it’s fitting that the best way to watch a play called Deep Blue Sound–Sound as in Puget–is to just let it wash over you. Because more than anything else, it’s a play about a community: an unnamed small town on an unnamed island, close enough to Seattle that people commute, but also small-town enough that everyone knows everyone else, knows everyone else’s business, and has been known to strike a pose of reverie in the soup aisle to avoid engaging in whatever unwelcome human encounter in the grocery store.  Playwright Abe Koogler captures the texture of small-town life, but the whole remains just abstract enough to keep you from connecting too deeply.

Specific characters emerge from and resubmerge into the pool of unnamed islanders involved in a town committee to find a missing pod of whales, but the play is structured around a series of community meetings and the lightly sketched residents who populate them. Koogler’s piece starts with a Brechtian conceit whereby the different Islanders, seated in a semicircle of mismatched chairs in what seems to be some sort of community center or church basement, introduce themselves with a little précis of the other role(s) they play. But while that does prepare you for the role-switching that will occur throughout without much signposting, it doesn’t really set up the way the play actually works, which is in a series of episodic, sometimes overlapping, but predominantly solidly realistic scenes. (Director Arin Arbus hasn’t quite figured out how to indicate the distinction between when actors are portraying generic Islanders and when they’re portraying the main named characters. The primary and secondary named characters sort out visibly enough, but the generic quality of the Islander pool makes their scant details blend into the better-defined characters in confusing ways.) 

Even the “main” characters are drawn in light pencil, with just enough detail to follow their threads, which only loosely connect: Ella (Maryann Plunkett), dying of cancer and not wanting her friends Mary (Tala Ashe) and John (Thomas Jay Ryan) to know; Ella’s daughter, Ali (Brittany K. Allen, wry and tender), come home to take care of her. Joy, the local newspaper editor (Natsuko Ohana), drafted in to help write Ella’s obituary. Mary’s estranged husband, Chris (Armando Riesco), who wants to reconcile with his wife. And a few outsiders: Les (Jan Leslie Harding, endearingly weird), a horse groomer looking for love, and “Homeless Gary” (Bruce McKenzie), who brings a chainsaw everywhere and offers to chop up wood. 

In a different play, Les and Gary would find some sort of connection, but fortunately Deep Blue Sound isn’t so predictable. Here, there’s a lot of lonely people: John makes tentative, mostly fruitless efforts to befriend Gary, while still thinking of a lost love; Ella does the same with Joy; Les keeps getting ghosted by the pen pals she meets online; Ali keeps thinking about reconnecting with her ex and Mary struggles to keep her distance with Chris. 

The missing whales, a family of orcas, are reliably to be seen in the waters surrounding the island at this time of year; watching them leap out of the waves provides a brief moment of transcendence. But this year–no whales. The town’s “symbolic Mayor,” Annie (Crystal Finn, with her inimitable way of taking her characters seriously enough to make them all the funnier), takes it upon herself to form a whale-finding committee. They have no resources, no scientific knowledge (well, one of them once had an affair with a German oceanographer, whose input is not particularly encouraging), and no plan. So it’s no surprise that those meetings are pretty fruitless; the whales are going to do what they’re going to do. (We do get a few answers on that front, but not because of anything the committee actually achieved.)

The cause isn’t going to save the Islanders–they’re going to have to find their own moments of transcendence, their own moments of beauty, elsewhere. And by the end of the play, they’re trying: Les booking a trip she’s always wanted to take; John reaching out to Santiago and bringing Ella a roomful of flowers; Mary opening the door to allowing Chris back into her life; Annie acknowledging the limits of her role. The community has to move on, as communities do. 

Still, there’s a vagueness about the whole thing. The island and town hover between archetype and specifically imagined place. The design elements and Arbus’s direction, too, feel suspended between the intentionally generic and the particular. Arbus brings textured individual performances out of the strong cast, but the characters remain so atomized that it’s hard for them to act together. The little moments when people really get through to one another, really see one another, bring little pops of emotion, whether that connection is positive–single mother Mo (Finn again) recognizing her son’s (Riesco again) passion for dance–or negative–Joy pushing distance back into her relationship with rejecting Ella’s friendship. But those moments feel like random stones dropped into the water; there’s no real center of gravity here. It’s not unenjoyable to spend time immersed in this place, but there’s not a lot of there there.