A ‘Moby Dick’ that plunges right into the soul

For several long moments at the beginning of “Moby Dick,’’ Conor Lovett stands motionless, shrouded in darkness, listening intently to the mournful sounds produced by a fiddle player who shares the stage with him.

When Lovett finally steps into the light, he speaks three words that constitute one of the most famous opening lines in all of literature: “Call me Ishmael.’’

Lovett’s Ishmael appears hesitant, even slightly abashed, as if he feels unworthy to be the bearer of such a momentous tale, or is still so haunted by the memories locked inside him that he’s reluctant to give them voice, to tell his story.

But tell it he proceeds to do, casting a considerable spell in the process. In a production by Gare St. Lazare Players Ireland that will run through Saturday at the Jackie Liebergott Black Box in the Paramount Center, Lovett delivers a performance that illustrates the power of storytelling - at least when it’s done as well as it is here - to enlist an audience for a journey of the imagination.

Under the direction of Judy Hegarty Lovett, who is married to the actor and adapted the novel with him, the production could scarcely be sparer. Apart from occasional, dirge-like musical interludes by fiddler Caoimhin O’Raghallaigh, “Moby Dick’’ consists of nothing more than Lovett himself, a wooden table on which he sometimes splays the fingers of his left hand, and the effects he can create with his voice, face, and body. And, of course, the fathoms-deep richness of Herman Melville’s language as his characters grapple with the workings of fate.

Building from his deliberately low-key beginning, Lovett skillfully channels not just Ishmael, the young sailor who leaves “the good city of old Manhatto’’ in search of adventure at sea, but also Captain Ahab, obsessed to the point of madness by his quest for revenge against the great white whale who bit off his leg; Queequeg, the kindly Polynesian harpooner who befriends Ishmael after an initially awkward encounter in a New Bedford inn; Starbuck, the chief mate (and future namesake of a certain chain that sells overpriced coffee); and other crew members aboard the Pequod, that doomed whaleship.