When Rinde Eckert’s “Moby-Dick”-themed “And God Created Great Whales” premiered in 2000, it racked up rave reviews and many awards, and went on to several revivals.
Well, call me Ishmael, but I don’t understand the hoopla.
Now being revived by the Culture Project, it’s a pretentious avant-garde music-theater piece about Nathan (Eckert), a composer struggling to complete his magnum opus — an opera based on Herman Melville’s classic novel. There is more than a little urgency to Nathan’s situation because, as his voice on a cassette tape keeps reminding him, he’s in the final stages of losing his mind.
Helping him is his muse, Olivia (Nora Cole), whom the tape helpfully points out is “a product of your imagination.”
For 80 long minutes we watch as Nathan works at his piano, strewn with hundreds of Post-it notes — and periodically performs excerpts from his opera, which, from what we hear of it, would be better left unfinished. Along the way he interrupts himself — singing the traditional folk song “Shenandoah” in an ethereal falsetto while tapping a tambourine, and trying to prompt his memory with flashcards of common words.
Olivia, who happens to be a singer, is generally supportive, although she’s peeved when he resists her suggestion that she perform a supporting role in his all-male piece. As played by the strong-voiced Cole, it’s hard not to agree with her.
An unsubtle meditation on the obsessive nature of artistic creation — Nathan pursues his goal as resolutely as Ahab went after his great white whale — the piece, strongly directed by David Schweizer, has its moments. As played by the bald, stocky Eckert with an old-fashioned tape player slung around his neck and a belt of duct tape, Nathan makes a haunting figure. John Torres and Caleb Wertenbaker’s set design — with its bare bulbs, old-fashioned tape players hung from the ceiling and a piano bound with rope as if it’s cargo on a sailing ship — imaginatively reflects the show’s themes.
But like its inspiration — a great novel that only a few people have actually read all the way through — “And God Created Great Whales” is more interesting to think about than to endure.