Charlie (Burke Brimmer) is a shut-in, weighs 600 pounds, and is dying. His one friend, Liz (Amanda Eaton), a nurse, enables his obesity even as she tries to save him. And his only other contact with the outside world is through the lessons he broadcasts out (sans camera) to his online writing students. But just as Charlie’s prognosis worsens, his life suddenly intersects with a random young Mormon (Gus LaRou) and his own estranged teenage daughter, Ellie (Ella Briman). Everyone is contending with a loss, pain, or sense of not belonging, in Samuel D. Hunter’s The Whale, an odd and poignant dark-comic drama on stage now at Mad Horse, directed by Christine Louise Marshall. 

Charlie’s bulk is literally center stage for much of the show; Brimmer wears it as a huge, shocking, cushiony prosthesis, darkened with grease stains on the legs (a fine, cringe-worthy touch). Within this body, Charlie barely moves. He sits, eats, and teaches in a living room that’s squalid and haunted: cans and food wrappers litter the floor, and on the putty-colored walls float the white ghosts of where photographs once hung.