WASHINGTON -- Sigmund, the giant squid, doesn't appear to the audience but he's one of the leading characters in "The Muckle Man," a new play that opens Wednesday at Washington's Source Theater.
The play is by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, 28, a student at the Yale School of Drama. Another of his plays, "Say You Love Satan," opens at Dad's Garage Theater in Atlanta next month.
The "muckle man" is the ghost of a long-ago shipwrecked sailor who comes ashore in human form. He tries to entice into the sea the wife of a scientist who has found the first live giant squid near their home on a bleak bay off Newfoundland. The scientist refuses to leave, despite her pleas, while Sigmund is alive to be studied.
Aguirre-Sacasa calls it a dark fairy tale for grown-ups.
"The giant squid in 'The Muckle Man' is the play's mystery, its symbol," the playwright says in his stage direction. "Like real giant squid it should never be seen."
Herman Melville in "Moby-Dick" and Jules Verne in "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" also wrote about giant squid, with no indication that they had actually seen one. With eyes described as big as manhole covers and tentacles that make an adult up to 60 feet long, it's the world's largest spineless creature.
Parts of dead or dying giant squid are often found, but no complete living specimen has been reported.
In describing his fictional scientist's work, Aguirre-Sacasa had the help of Clyde Roper, a curator of invertebrates at Washington's National Museum of Natural History. The museum calls Roper the world's foremost authority on the subject.
Roper led two expeditions that failed to capture a giant squid off the Azores islands in the Atlantic and off New Zealand in the South Pacific. He believes that large numbers of them live in darkness 2,000 to 3,000 feet under water.
Early this year Jean-Michel Cousteau, son of the late ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau, gave up another unsuccessful expedition to New Zealand.
