Amazing Grace: Rinde Eckert's And God Created Great Whales and An Idiot Divine

In the densely layered music-theater where he has written and performed since the early 1980s, Rinde Eckert has always shifted musical forms and styles effortlessly--even virtuosically--within a single piece. His scores (some written with his long-standing artistic partner Paul Dresher) blend an abundant and astonishing range of musical influences: Electronic, rock, and blues idioms give way to playful lieder, swells of lyric opera, Indian vocal forms, acoustic guitar solos, folk songs, and slide-whistle arias. His musical shadings are subtle, fluid, and powerful. In performance Eckert's booming baritone (he trained as an opera singer) can fill a hall with plaintive lyricism, but in a given piece he might also reach into countertenor at a particularly ecstatic moment or wail like a banshee or murmur a story into a microphone.

Eckert marshals these considerable musical talents into theater pieces that can be as compelling as they are iconoclastic. Most are small-scale or solo works, and often they plunge into the interior lives of their protagonists--usually loner-eccentrics poised precariously on the edge of some psychological chasm. These lives frequently intersect with literary themes; at their best his pieces push the resulting ironies almost to the point of vertigo. In The Gardening of Thomas D. (1992) the title character, who has suffered a nervous breakdown in a large suburban shopping mall, hallucinates elements of Dante's Divine Comedy taking place on a baseball diamond and performed by singing monks. Romeo Sierra Tango (1998) transports Shakespeare's Romeo to the battlefields of World War I to confront the casualties of romantic idealism and self-delusion. In those works Eckert gently teases out canny ironies from his literary substructures, sidestepping the pitfalls of deconstruction. Those heroes find their consciousness inextricably intertwined with grand narratives and classic themes; great literature intrudes on their isolated minds and becomes a matter of life and death.

And God Created Great Whales, produced with the Foundry Theatre in New York last June and September, may be more accessible than some of Eckert's previous work. (The New York Times signaled its approval with a review raving about how the piece subverts expectations, prompting a month-long extension and placing Eckert in the downtown spotlight.) True to form, the musical pastiche has several wonderfully expressive sequences, despite a surprisingly flat dramatic scenario.

Great Whales centers on Nathan, an opera composer struggling daily to write his great opus, an operatic version of Moby-Dick. But despite Nathan's considerable creative powers, the task eludes him because he's rapidly losing his mind. In his rumpled and ill-fitting suit, Nathan resembles a frumpy would-be modernist. He sits at his piano baffled and in innocence, oblivious to the heap of scores, notebooks, and pages revealing his previous efforts. Clustered around him are color-coded cassette tape recorders designated (we don't know by whom) for specific purposes. One stands ready to record his inspirational thoughts, one is for random ideas, another for working drafts, and still another (mostly blank) for finished product.

Recorded messages, played back from a machine hanging around his neck, guide Nathan in his task; otherwise he might forget what he's writing and even who and where he is. The voice coming from these tapes is his own-- perhaps recorded in a time of greater lucidity, before the onset of his devastating memory loss. Or perhaps the voice belongs to someone else, and we simply hear it filtered through Nathan's mind. "Eventually you will even forget how to breathe," the voice informs him in an early scene; "One might say you will drown in your own ignorance."

Resolved to finish the great work before time erases everything, Nathan's quirky mind races and wanders; you keep thinking he's like a cross between Ahab and Krapp, though the piece reveals surprisingly few dimensions of the character. The Ahab comparisons are...