Call me Ishmael

Rinde Eckert dominates the stage in several ways. He’s a big man with a striking look—the shaved head being just the start. He also has a large voice, the sort of voice one associates with opera. Eckert is also a writer and composer. And all those attributes come into play with And God Created Great Whales, the two-character play-slash-opera that Eckert has brought to the Mondavi Center for five performances this week.

Eckert plays a composer who is struggling to complete an opera based on the Herman Melville classic novel Moby Dick, a title that rings a bell with almost everyone (though relatively few people nowadays actually have read the book). But here’s the rub: The composer is suffering from some sort of degenerative disease that is robbing him of his memory gradually—the term “Alzheimer’s disease” isn’t used specifically, but that’s more or less what’s happening.

So, as the composer labors on his libretto and his score while adapting the tale of the obsessed sea captain Ahab and his great, deadly adversary, the white whale, the composer is locked in his own mortal battle with disease. Eckert described the composer this way: “He ends up disappearing into his own opera. As his mind goes down for the last time, he becomes Ahab and goes down with the whale, never to be seen again.”

The composer also is visited by his muse (played by Nora Cole, who has done both Broadway musicals and opera), who looks rather like a nurse. The composer attempts to keep track of his increasingly disordered thoughts through the use of a small flotilla of tape recorders hanging from wires and color coded for different categories of messages and reminders. And, in the center of it all, sits a grand piano, where Eckert plays, composes, sings and even does a bit of dancing.

After its off-Broadway run, And God Created Great Whales picked up a special citation at the 2000-2001 Obie Awards. The New York Times described Eckert’s performance as “total magic.” The reviewers concluded that it wasn’t an easy piece to categorize; some described it as “opera-like” or “opera as poetry.” Think of it as a chamber opera, perhaps. Eckert himself calls it opera “in the sense that it has operatic grandeur. … Some of the singing is operatic, and some is not. … There are also dialogues and monologues and interstitial music that’s ambient. Some of it sounds slightly baroque, some more 19th-century figuration. Some of it is folk-centered, so it traverses a number of different styles.”

Eckert is the son of two opera singers. He first appeared onstage at the age of 8, in a New York production of La Bohème that featured his father. Eckert later earned his master’s degree at Yale and studied for four years under Metropolitan Opera star Phyllis Curtin.

Eckert’s ideas about opera were expanded considerably when he encountered the Robert Wilson and Philip Glass work Einstein on the Beach in the 1970s. Eckert eventually made his way to San Francisco, where he linked up with composer and performer Paul Dresher and toured with such operatic and electric multimedia shows as Slow Fire, Power Failure and Awed Behavior.

Eckert was the co-creator and featured performer in the Steve Mackey opera Ravenshead, which visited UC Davis last year. (Ravenshead also has a nautical theme, which involves a self-promoting mariner who wants to sail around the world but whose voyage comes to a disastrous end.)

The five-performance run of And God Created Great Whales also is an example of the new programming flexibility created by the Mondavi Center’s cozy, 250-seat Studio Theater. In past years, a show like this would have stopped for one or perhaps two performances. The Studio Theater allows Mondavi Center programmers to bring in smaller, more experimental shows for a longer stay.