"Only drowned men drown. Everything else floats," says one character in Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble's (PETE) latest, the cumbersomely-titled [Or, The Whale]. Though ostensibly a riff on Herman Melville's Moby Dick, there are no actual whales. Instead, Juli Crockett's script is a fevered, fuguelike existential crisis delivered by a trio of peg-legged Captain Ahabs embodying a single splintered psyche.

In other words, this play is really fucking weird. I'm not sure why PETE chose to produce it, and I like experimental theater. Crockett has written that rare experimental work that's so unwieldy it becomes equal parts pretentious opacity and sing-song-y nonsense, creating ample opportunity for things to go horribly wrong.

With that, I'll retire my Statler and Waldorf mustache, because somehow PETE pulls it off on the skill of its cast alone.

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