in And God Created Great Whales
Photo: Carol Rosegg
Melanie Joseph, the intense and animated artistic director of the Foundry Theatre Company, leans across her desk and shouts, “The microcosm is so huge!” And that, I think, is the Foundry in a phrase. With acclaimed philosopher and activist Cornel West on its board, genocide discussion groups on its agenda, three Obie awards and two Drama Desk nominations under its belt, and a new musical theater piece, And God Created Great Whales, by the multi-talented Rinde Eckert opening next week, the Foundry’s microcosm is huge–and getting huger.
Due to this hugeness, it’s difficult to pin the company down. All of its programming comes from Joseph’s impetus, yet she gets her leads from the artists she knows: “If I’m interested in your art, then I’m interested also in your curatorial eye.” The Foundry’s growth, therefore, has been organic, artist-driven, emanating outward from a core of conceptual community.
This type of growth has brought about a distinct, yet diverse, style. I mean, just look at the work they do:
· Numerous performance texts on the difficulty of object relations by W. David Hancock
· “Never Again: A Town Meeting,” featuring a panel of world-renowned journalists covering war crimes
· Gertrude and Alice: A Likeness to Loving by Lola Pashalinski and Linda Chapman, directed by Anne Bogart, a relatively straight play on the relationship of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas
· The Roaring Girl, a 17th century Jacobean play, adapted by Alice Tuan (upcoming)
· Talk, a new theatre piece by poet/playwright/rap recording artist Carl Hancock Rux (upcoming)
And now, the Foundry has taken on Rinde Eckert, a writer of music and words, a singer and a dancer, whose piece And God Created Great Whales is about a gifted composer on a quest to finish his opus: an opera based on Melville’s Moby Dick. As Joseph describes, Eckert plays a musician named Nathan, who “has a tape recorder hung around his neck and every morning he wakes up and pushes play and it gives him his instructions, all of which he recorded in his more compos mentis moments.” Desperately fighting against a disease eating away at his mind, Nathan utilizes a vast array of musical techniques, physical motions, and textual metaphors to nail the whale of his musical mind.
According to Joseph, one of Eckert’s trademarks is that he pays “fastidious attention to his character and the miniatures of his world,” thus investigating the difficulties and opportunities of the autistic/artistic dichotomy. His performances present “multitextual layers of consideration so that his character is somehow fractalized by the nature of the work itself.” Through this process, Eckert synthesizes seemingly unconnected concepts into a wonderful, troubling whole.
