BECOMING UNUSUAL

A work-in-progress, solo concert of song, dramatic monologues, lecture and video from RINDE ECKERT’s anthology of theatrical loners.

Since the early 1980s, Rinde Eckert has been writing, composing, performing and directing evocative and haunting performance pieces and plays that have pushed at the edges of recognized theatrical form.  With a virtuosic command of gesture and language, he moves beyond the boundaries of what a 'play,' a 'dance piece,’ an 'opera' or a 'musical' might be. In the service of grappling with complex issues, his work is a series of variations on a smart, slightly cock-eyed Everyman who begins his journey with a pure sense of mission and descends into the maelstrom.

 Songwriter, composer, librettist, musician, performer, director and total theatre artist Rinde Eckert's art is formally inventive, asks difficult questions, and is emphatically theatrical. Drawing on and combining to extraordinary ends a vast array of theatrical, literary, historical, philosophical, and musical influences, Eckert’s complex works consistently defy easy explanation and categorization. Sometimes tragic and austere, sometimes broadly comedic, entirely grounded by presence, his work is alchemical: moving from rumination and distillation to hard-won illumination, or its lack.

“Little men with big ideas whose consequences of their hubris are often disastrous" people Rinde’s work.  His characters include a man caught between the American dream of success and consumerism and the alienating psychoses of contemporary urban living; a composer trying to write an opera while losing his memory; a man who commits a slow suicide while sailing solo around the world; a Mafia accountant who has a change of heart; a musician obsessed with the unknown woman his taxi mows down one rainy night.

John Rockwell, writing in the New York Times, referred to the persona that emerge from Mr. Eckert’s texts as that of “an American loner-eccentric, with touches of Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, and Tom Waits.” 

Dubbed the originator of the “one-person opera”, Rinde Eckert’s work has been commissioned, produced and performed throughout the United States, including four off-Broadway runs, and at major festivals in Europe and Asia.