Brilliant theater is not always fun.

Death of a Salesman.

A Streetcar Named Desire.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Angels in America.

Equus.

The best plays succeed because they depress, rattle, upset and stun us with stories that are heartrending, unsettling, and just plain unpleasant, because, of course, life is unpleasant, sometimes. Life can be heartrending and unpleasant—and theater, simply put, is a reflection of life . . . the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Which brings us the Samuel D, Hunter’s The Whale, now running at Marin Theatre Company in Mill Valley. A critical hit last year in New York, The Whale serves up a fearlessly blunt, occasionally bitter, yet supremely compassionate slice of life that is beautifully written, emotionally knotty, and anything but traditionally “enjoyable.”

Directed with documentary openness by Jasson Minadakis, The Whale may be the best new play I’ve seen this year - and still . . . I cannot think of another show, or another set of characters, I have felt more beaten up, assaulted and challenged by.

I love it, but I can’t say I liked it.

Charlie is a 600-pound shut-in, an English teacher with a death wish he is close to accomplishing. Charlie, in a remarkable performance by the (non-obese) Nicholas Pelczar, is brought to life with an impressive body-sized prosthetic, which, to be fair, doesn’t

always look exactly right - a skinny man’s head and neck attached to large man’s body . . . but it certainly makes the point. Charlie rarely moves from his shabby couch, and when he does, wheezing and grimacing, it’s with great effort and obvious pain.

Still grieving the absence of his long-dead lover - who, ironically, starved himself to death ten years ago - Charlie’s aching heart barely functions to keep him breathing, and yet Charlie, large hearted in every sense of the word, somehow manages to see the best in other people, while stubbornly abandoning all hope and faith in himself, aggressively deconstructing any remaining will to live.

Taking place over the last days of Charlie’s life (you think of it as Death of a Fatman), The Whale is not a direct reference to Charlie’s size. The title comes from a student’s essay on the novel Moby Dick, coupled with a few references to the biblical story of Jonah and the whale. Taken along with Charlie’s vastness, each of those iconic stories lends resonance to Charlie’s own personal tale of lost dreams, lost love, and the cruel twists of fate. As Charlie resists the loving encouragement of his best friend Liz (Liz Sklar), he finds himself reaching out to two unlikely strangers: a troubled young Mormon

missionary, and Ellie, Charlie’s deeply resentful teenage daughter, who hasn’t seen her father since she was two.

Ellie is easily the most hateful, angry, cruel and unlikable character I have seen on stage in a very long time. Ellie hates everyone and everything, especially Charlie, who still somehow loves her, and is actually thrilled with her every ugly utterance. He sees her as “amazing,” even when she snaps shots of him and posts them to Facebook with vicious commentary.

Somehow, Charlie still sees her that way . . . amazing.

And that’s one of the many miracles of Hunter’s ingenious drama.

Through Charlie’s insistence, we the audience eventually start trying, cautiously and skeptically, to try and see what Charlie sees in this sociopathic monster that is his daughter. And conversely, in the face of Ellie’s disgust with her father’s appearance, we start to wish she’d see what we see - the good, if wounded and frustratingly suicidal

man beneath that fat suit.

Which makes the artificiality of that suit seem all the more significant. Are we the skin we wear? Or are we more? It’s an important question.The Whale, after all, is really all about seeing below the surface of things, looking deeper than what we first assume

and see.