He Has That Indefinable Something

Onstage, a lone figure in a yellow slicker harangues in a gibbering frenzy. Now he declaims in stentorian operatic tones, now he croons tenderly; now he slides up to a high falsetto, now he rocks with the amplified backup of an offstage band.

His moods swing like the boom of his drifting sailboat, caught in the wind. He is manic. He is irritating. You can’t take your eyes off him. He comes to rest, finally, hanging from the mast, in a silhouette of crucifixion.

The work is “Ravenshead,” a chamber opera, with music by Steven Mackey performed by the Paul Dresher Ensemble. And the solo performer in this evening-length show, with a text he wrote himself, is Rinde Eckert.

Within a certain segment of the performing arts world, Eckert, 48, is a well-known phenomenon. “His name is bobbed around in hip theater circles,” says George Steel of the Miller Theater at Columbia University in New York, who booked “Ravenshead” in 1998. Audiences at the Miller and other small university theaters know Eckert--whose youthful baldness and solid athletic build evoke Bruce Willis--for his striking performances in original musical-dramatic monologues. “Slow Fire,” a collaboration with Paul Dresher, depicts a hit man making duck decoys and pondering his father’s suicide. “Romeo Sierra Tango,” a one-man riff on “Romeo and Juliet,” starts from the premise that poison brought Romeo not death, but immortality; he soliloquizes on a battlefield in World War I.

Others think of Eckert as a singer. Trained operatically, he has released three CDs variously categorized as rock or folk--”like Tom Waits with a voice,” was one critic’s description. A voice indeed: Eckert outdoes most vocalists with a range of 3 1/2 octaves.

In the world of the mainstream performing arts, however--straight theater, pop music, opera and film--hardly anyone has heard of him.

Eckert, a singer-composer-actor-author-dancer, is unconcerned with definition, except to say what his work is not. “If you call it music theater,” he says, “they think you’re doing ‘Hello, Dolly!’ ”

“Experimental theater” isn’t an accurate term, either. “It’s not experimental anymore. A lot of us have been doing it for a long time.”

And it’s not opera. “Operatic describes the exaggerated world I’m inhabiting, [but] stripped of 19th century stuff. But then, it’s not opera, because opera is 19th century. People can’t see this as opera, and I have to agree. It doesn’t resemble anything operatic.”

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For some, such as composer Mackey, this lack of definition is a virtue rather than a conundrum. Mackey, a guitarist-composer whose work is in the repertory of the San Francisco Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra and others, had never worked with Eckert before “Ravenshead.” He had his own problems with the term “chamber opera.”

“I grew up as a rock musician,” he says. “My original vision [for “Ravenshead”] had as much to do with Jim Morrison, a frontman with a band, as it did with chamber opera. Approaching it, I didn’t feel like I was writing an opera but writing a piece for a great singer with a band. This is another reason Rinde appeals to me--I’m not a great fan of operatic singing.”

Actually, Eckert did train as an opera singer; both his parents, in fact, were freelance opera singers in New York until his father took a teaching position and relocated the family from New Jersey to the University of Iowa, in Iowa City. After completing his own vocal undergraduate work there, Eckert went back East and quickly began questioning his allegiance to opera. His greatest mentor was American soprano Phyllis Curtin, well known for her commitment to modern music. “Phyllis must have premiered more new work than anyone in the ‘50s and ‘60s,” Eckert says. “I got from her a sense that there might be some way of approaching work that utilizes all one’s gifts.”

Trying to figure out what that approach might be, Eckert completed a master’s degree at Yale in 1975 while doing, as he tells it, akido, tai chi and a few off-Broadway shows. Then came a call from some friends in Seattle who had formed an ensemble dubbed the New Performance Group, specializing in what Eckert calls “really wild concerts.” The move to the West Coast brought him into contact with avant-garde San Francisco theater director George Coates, who was putting together his own ensemble with Paul Dresher, among others. “We kind of jump started his company,” Eckert recounts.

But Coates’ brand of theater wasn’t quite what Eckert wanted either. “Paul [Dresher] and I were more interested in narrative, in ways of telling the story that were more challenging,” he says. “We wanted to go in a slightly different direction.”

That direction has entailed ten collaborations between Dresher and Eckert since 1980. “Slow Fire,” written in 1985 and performed extensively in the U.S. and Europe, was what put them on the map. In 1988, New York Times critic John Rockwell called it “the most exciting performance art since the early days of Laurie Anderson.”

Eckert is a little less off the wall than Anderson; his approach is more deeply rooted in classical conventions of music and text. He is prodigiously articulate--even in conversation, his speech emerges in paragraphs of unpruned but publishable prose--and his singing betrays his operatic background.

Still, Eckert, like Mackey, has trouble with the idea of ‘chamber opera”; in his eyes, opera today is a problematic form.

“There’s a basic fallacy: that the sonorities of the 19th century voice are capable of making 20th century ironies distinct. Voices developed in the 19th century were trained to express pure emotions: love or hate. Not love mitigated by hate. As a result, [contemporary] language goes out the window.”

In his own work, “I tend to flatten out classically operatic values in order to make the text intelligible.”

The result is a hybrid vocal style that’s not quite like anything you’ve heard before. “I’ve had experience in the past writing for classical singers,” says Mackey, “when I’ve asked them to speak a line of text. It always comes out wooden or stilted or overdone. With Rinde, it comes off great. In ‘Ravenshead,’ there are rapid-fire changes between singing and speaking; Rinde pulls it off as if it were natural, as if he were a creature who happens to communicate this way.”

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Although Eckert wrote the text for “Ravenshead,” the original idea was Mackey’s. The composer had become interested in the true story of Donald Crowhurst, an English businessman who decided to take part in a solo sailing race around the world in 1968 despite his inexperience with boats. The trip was a disaster from the start. Crowhurst’s boat began to leak, his equipment malfunctioned, and he got way off course. At sea for 243 days, he gradually went mad. When his boat was found it was drifting, empty, with only diaries on board to document his decline and demonstrate that he had, in the end, taken his own life.

When Mackey approached Dresher with the idea for a one-man show based on Crowhurst’s story, Dresher suggested that Eckert might be an ideal librettist, as well as a performer. Indeed, Crowhurst seemed to fit right in with the gallery of oddball loners that have populated Eckert’s other pieces: the lone hit man in “Slow Fire,” or Romeo as anachronous survivor.

There’s humor to these eccentric figures, as well as pathos. Among Eckert’s major influences are Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel: “poets who are declaiming their own work. It’s exactly what I do.” And Crowhurst, like Chaplin’s Little Tramp, is “a cartoon. He’s a failed businessman with a pathetic ambition. There’s great tragicomic potential because it’s so stupid.”

So Eckert went to work on the project with a will--which doesn’t meant that he sat down and produced a text for Mackey to set. For Eckert, theater is a collaborative process: “You sit in a room with all these experts”--director, composer, set designer, actor--”looking at this space that you’re going to sculpt.” The process is about working out, in real time and space, the way movement, music and words work on the stage--not about creating a fixed text and then “directing” it.

This approach makes Eckert an eminently flexible collaborator. “I could write a line for him to sing,” Mackey says, “and he would sing it and say, ‘You know, with your melody the word should be such and such,’ and change the word. Probably more often we started with me writing music and him writing words to fit the music.”

On the other hand, the flexibility can go too far. “As we were coming down to the wire, a lot of things in his text were left to the last moment,” Mackey says. “He’d say, ‘I’ve got to see how this feels onstage.’ My music is complicated to change. I’d bring my laptop to rehearsals and make changes, print out the new parts. In a traditional opera company, [or] on Broadway, you can’t do that. As we were going along, I’d wish he couldn’t do it here.”

Once a piece has opened, Eckert generally stops tinkering. By now, he’s performed “Ravenshead” more than 20 times. “ ‘Ravenshead’ is an example of a piece that’s matured over time,” he says. “Its motives have become clearer to all of us, and the performances take on a little of that patina. Often I’ve performed a work for a year and someone will come a year later and say, ‘Oh, the changes make it so much better,’ and I haven’t changed a thing. I’ve just deepened my understanding of it.”

Critical response to the work has been mixed. The intricate music, heavily miked, veers between sound painting and mere sound effect, and the text can wax so verbose that it’s hard to develop real sympathy with the character. Some reviewers found the piece inherently flawed; on the other hand, USA Today called it the “Best New Opera of 1998.” But virtually everyone concurred that Eckert’s performance --which “went from intense to more intense,” wrote the New York Press--was a tour de force.

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Eckert always has several irons in the fire. Having relocated in the early 1990s from California back to New York--his wife, actor-playwright Ellen McLaughlin, played Emily in the Broadway production of “Angels in America”--he set out to overcome the “East Coast provincial view that California artists are some kind of strange creature.”

The effort has evidently paid off. It was the New York Shakespeare Festival that commissioned “Romeo Sierra Tango” in 1998. In January, just before he left for the “‘Ravenshead” tour, Eckert wrapped up a series of workshops for his new piece “And God Made Great Whales,” inspired by Melville’s “Moby-Dick,” opening at New York’s Foundry Theater in June.

Still, Eckert remains something of an insider tip, a burgeoning talent mostly within the limits of the special niche he’s carved out for himself.

Which is how he likes it.

His character is even delineated in his unusual name. “Rinde,” his mother’s maiden name, derives from the old Norse word for the high hills surrounding a town, and, by extension, for any outer region or covering (it is a cognate to our word “rind”).

“In Norway,” Eckert says, “artists outside the norm were people of the Rinde, of the outer districts. It’s perfect for me. Working in the outer district, looking inside at all the parties and saying, ‘I like my campfire, I like it out here.’ ”

His name, it turns out, is the only definition that really fits the phenomenon of Rinde Eckert.

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“RAVENSHEAD,” Freud Playhouse, UCLA. Date: Friday, 8 p.m. Prices: $9-$25. Phone: (310) 825-2102. Also: Carpenter Performing Arts Center, Cal State Long Beach, 6200 Atherton St. Saturday, 8 p.m. $18-$23. (562) 985-7000.