The Thing About Jellyfish
Berkeley Rep's Outstanding World Premiere
By: Victor Cordell - Feb 07, 2025
The greatest mystery of life is death. Many religions fundamentally exist by trying to make sense out of what happens when mortals pass from this earth, which then informs how we live our lives. Is there a heaven and hell? Do we reincarnate? Will we see our loved ones again? Against this backdrop are the two extreme manners of dying – protracted illness that allows the deceased to put affairs in order, and sudden death, that prevents closure with loved ones, which can haunt survivors endlessly.
Playwright Keith Bunin has adapted Ali Benjamin’s bestselling novel The Thing About Jellyfish for the stage. Berkeley Rep’s world premiere bursts at the seams with a compelling story about the search for meaning in a production whose arresting visual dynamics engulf the senses.
Sixth-grader, motormouth, and know-it-all Suzy doesn’t realize that she pushes peers away by her dominance. She has only one friend, Franny, who dies on vacation from drowning off the coast of Maryland. Knowing that Franny was an accomplished swimmer, the distraught Suzy is certain that there must be a more specific cause.
A voracious learner, she reads of and attributes the drowning to an exotic but deadly jellyfish, even though the species is known to inhabit only as far north as Florida. But its sting is rarely detected in an autopsy, usually resulting in the conclusion that the deceased has drowned without other known cause. From the distress of her loss, Suzy also turns mute, which challenges her parents and teacher alike.
Much of the narrative is told in flashback. We see a family in transition and archetypes of young teens from the snooty girl to the gross-out boy whose actions are as gross as his language. And we get to know more about Suzy, and particularly of her fractured relationship with Franny at the time of her death.
In present time, Suzy must choose a zoology project, and her copious research on the significance and sustainability of jellyfish is shared in the narrative. In dream sequences, she solicits jellyfish experts to help her in her quest to prove the cause of Franny’s death. But one of the many messages in the subtext is that people often misdirect their energy, fretting over questions that even if answered will change nothing. A loss is still a loss.
But the play is largely about relationships and how especially vulnerable they can be in the early teens. Change is signaled as children begin to feel maturity coming on and with it a sense of independence that creates friction with parents. Attraction to the opposite sex divides friends as do changes in life styles and other evolving preferences. Even though the content of the narrative concerns early teens, an adult audience will find it involving from beginning to end.
An additional dollop of meaning concerns the importance of search and discovery which drive Suzy’s curiosity. Finding through her research that jellyfish are able to deal with global warming and plastics pollution in the ocean in ways that most fish can’t, thereby suppressing marine biodiversity, carries an ominous warning.
In addition to the engaging script, superb acting anchors the play, led by a fantastic teen actor, Matilda Lawler as Suzy. Everpresent on stage and always part of the conversation (even when not speaking), the role places demands in its breadth of emotion and the sheer amount of dialog and stage presence to be mastered. But the most conspicuous star of the show is the stunning projection-driven visual staging, conceived by Director Tyne Rafaeli and designed by Derek McLane and Lucy Mackinnon, which is easy to see but hard to describe. A number of scenic designs are used, but the dominant format is like a cubic black canyon full of graphic, sometimes scrolling, displays on all walls that give a stunning high-tech appearance and tend to dwarf the actors into lesser significance.
Other production values are superior, including mammoth sound design. That said, at times, sound effects are surprisingly allowed to overpower dialog. At other times, speakers’ dialog is simply garbled or underprojected. These flaws are easily correctible, and in any case, do not materially limit the overall appreciation of an inventive and highly interesting experience.
The Thing About Jellyfish, a world premiere stage adaptation by Keith Bunin of Ali Benjamin’s novel of the same name, is produced by Berkeley Repertory Company and plays on its stage at 2025 Addison Street, Berkeley, CA through March 9, 2025.