The Middlebury Campus

Issue date: 10/10/07 Section: Arts

Media Credit: Courtesy Rinde Eckert directed, produced and acted in "Horizon," a powerful performance that deals with a struggle to understand faith and ethics. [Click to enlarge]

Interview with the playwright, Rinde Eckert, is produced by Radio Arts Middlebury. For more radio news, tune in every Wednesday at 4:30 PM on 91.1 FM WRMC.

Those unable to attend Wright Memorial Theatre on Oct. 8 for Rinde Eckert's production of "Horizon" missed out on a truly avant-garde theatrical moment. Challenging all normal dramatic conventions - as well as all other conventions, too - this performance piece created, written and composed by Eckert left audience members stunned. While astonishing both positively and negatively, there is still no doubt in the matter - "Horizon" is far from a theatrically mundane experience.

The piece chronicles the day in the life of Reverend Reinhart Poole (Eckert), a theologian grappling with his own faith. We follow Reinhart as he prepares for his last lecture at the seminary where he has been fired from after 25 years of teaching his course on "ethics." The groundbreaking and provocative nature of his work has been questioned by the seminary's administration, and without further explanation he is asked to leave.

Reinhart's day is filled with a bizarre mélange of happenings, 24 hours which seem suspended from any apparent normalcy or reality. He floats from conversations with his wife Patricia, to images of himself teaching. At some moments he remembers conversations with his father and mother or embarks in heated debate with the ghost of his brother. He also rereads the play that he has been writing, which tells the story of two masons who are constructing the foundations of a church only to then destroy it.

Based loosely on the life of Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), an important American theologian whose revolutionary ideas, like Reinhart Poole's, were not always willfully accepted. This is not to say that "Horizon" is a biographical representation of Niebuhr's life, but it is perhaps vital to recognize this fact in order to understand the performance's origins.

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