Nora Cole and Rinde Eckert in "And God Created Whales"
And God Created Great Whales began with Melville’s Moby Dick as a catalyst. I had initially intended to make a piece about a piano tuner trying to tune his piano perfectly, only to discover as he got closer to a foolproof science of tuning that he was farther from perfection of timbre. This proved to be too abstract a notion to convey within the relatively short span of an evening in the theater. Tuning, as it turns out, is difficult to explain.
I was left, however, with a character in whom I believed. Nathan, as I called him, had to be struggling with something.
Rinde Eckert; Photo by Michele Clement
I began to think about Moby Dick, about Romanticism, about the figure of the whale in the 19th century mind. I considered the fact that Moby Dick begins in the first person: “Call me Ishmael” and ends (before the epilogue) in third person (God’s eye view). It begins with a man feeling confined by his world, it ends in the infinite ocean “…and the great shroud of sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.” It’s the story, then, of a man saving himself from a kind of stagnation.
But it’s also the story of a man obsessed. The remarkable Ahab, whose leg has been taken (and presumably consumed) by a monstrous white whale dubbed Moby Dick, is bent on taking his revenge on the creature. In the end his obsession ends in tragedy, the whole crew going down in an unsuccessful effort to kill Moby Dick. So Ahab is a man missing a part of himself, who wishes, somehow, to feel whole again. He has been touched, “tasted”, by a mythic animal and his bourgeois life on land is no longer tenable. This is the way I thought of it, as a phenomenal desire to be complete, a spiritual journey into the infinite to retrieve one’s wholeness. Then I thought again of my piano tuner, Nathan. What could he be missing? What is constraining him, driving him out to sea? What is his “Moby Dick”, his ocean?
Rinde Eckert
When I contemplated the whale from the standpoint of the 19th century (Melville’s time), I realized that there was a fundamental paradox. The whale was mythic (very few people outside the whaling industry had ever seen one), but its byproducts — soaps, perfumes, combs, corset stays, etc. — were ubiquitous quotidian artifacts. So the whale was both something fantastic and something ordinary. “So”, I asked, “what might function in a similarly dichotomous fashion for a modern audience?”
Nathan is losing his memory (both a mythic and an ordinary thing). Time is ticking. He’s a piano tuner (his constraint) but he’s also an opera lover (his ocean). He decides to compose an opera as his legacy, a grand opera on Moby Dick — an almost impossible opera to stage — before his mind goes. In order to do this he needs help. He invents an imaginary friend to help him. This muse resembles an opera diva with whom he is enamored, whose piano he has occasionally tuned. Together they struggle to write the grand opera in his head. It’s a race against time, against the decay of his memory.
With actor/singer Nora Cole, director David Schweizer, and with the assistance of stage manager Scott Pegg, we wrestled with Nathan’s opera in his little garret, around his little grand piano, among his copious tape recorders, trying to come to terms with loss of the mind and reclamation of the soul. It’s a small piece about large things. We’re happy to be bringing it, finally, to LA.
And God Created Great Whales, presented by REDCAT. Jan. 25-29. Plays Weds.-Sat. 8:30 pm; Sun. 3 pm. Tickets: $10-25. Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater, 631 West 2nd Street, LA. 21- 237-2800. www.redcat.org.
And God Created Great Whales was originally produced by the Foundry Theater in New York. It won an Obie award in 2001 and was nominated for a Drama Desk award as well. It had two different runs at the Culture Project ( New York) in 2001 and 2002. It also ran at Center Stage in Baltimore for a month in 2002. It is being remounted by the Culture Project (45 Bleecker Theater) in New York this spring.
Rinde Eckert, the 2009 recipient of the Alpert Award in the Arts for his contributions to theater and finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Drama, is a writer, composer, performer and director. His Opera/New Music theater productions have toured throughout America, and to major theater festivals in Europe and Asia. For a full biography and to visit Eckert’s website, click here.
