Entertainment

Fabulous fish tale

Told he must go to the hospital or die of heart failure, Charlie flat-out refuses to leave his home. He lost his will to live a long time ago.

In Samuel D. Hunter’s wonderful new play, “The Whale,” Charlie — Shuler Hensley, in a startlingly poignant performance — has been eating himself to death for years. Now he guesses he’s about 600 pounds: “I haven’t been able to weigh myself in years,” Charlie wheezes. “It’s hard to know.” He never leaves his Idaho home, feeding on supersize sodas and buckets of fried chicken, and working as an online English-lit tutor.

Hensley is used to cumbersome costumes — he played the monster in the musical “Young Frankenstein” — but here he’s molded into a terrifyingly realistic fat suit. He’s a whale of a man, though “Moby-Dick” and Jonah also factor in the play, sometimes awkwardly.

For most of the show, Charlie sits on a couch, his head bobbing up on a mountain of fat. When he hobbles off to the bathroom, bent over his walker, it breaks your heart — because Charlie is one of the kindest people you could ever meet.

And in the limited time he has left, he’s determined to be honest, and to right some old wrongs.

After rebuking the medical advice of his friend and nurse, Liz (Cassie Beck, all brisk efficiency and prickly warmth), Charlie reaches out to his 17-year-old daughter, Ellie. They’ve been apart since she was 2, when he came out as gay and his wife (Tasha Lawrence) won full custody.

Ellie (a scarily intense Reyna de Courcy) turns out to be a callous monster who hates everybody, including her father. “You smell disgusting,” she tells him in her flat robot voice. “Your apartment is disgusting. You look disgusting.”

She does agree to spend time with him, but that’s because he offers to pay her.

It’s a sign of the playwright’s realistic approach that Ellie doesn’t noticeably soften around her dad. The honesty Charlie seeks can be double-edged.

As in his 2010 breakthrough, “A Bright New Boise,” Hunter gently looks at how people experience faith. He takes the comfort religion brings seriously — something rare on New York stages — though he doesn’t sugarcoat the pain certain teachings can inflict.

Indeed, Charlie unraveled after his boyfriend withered away under his Mormon family’s pressure. The arrival of a young missionary with a mysterious agenda (Cory Michael Smith) only revives awful memories.

Under Davis McCallum’s sensitive direction, the cast brings these walking wounded to life with empathy. After nearly two intermissionless hours, you feel as if you’ve met real people, made of flesh — in one case, lots of flesh — and blood.