The Lensic Performing Arts Center presents an evening with the complex and gifted artist, Rinde Eckert, performing his new, one-man multimedia work-in-progress, Becoming… Unusual: The Education of an Eclectic, on November 4. Becoming Unusual is a solo concert of song, dramatic monologues, lecture and video from Rinde Eckert’s anthology of theatrical loners. The performance is part of the Lensic Presents series, Under Construction, a part of the Lensic Presents programming that showcases theater works in progress.

With a virtuosic command of gesture and language, songwriter, composer, librettist, musician, performer, director and total theater artist Rinde Eckert moves beyond the boundaries of what a ‘play,’ a ‘dance piece,’ an ‘opera’ or ‘musical’ might be. His art is formally inventive, asks difficult questions, and is emphatically theatrical. 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.

“Little men with big ideas whose consequences of their hubris are often disastrous” are characters populating 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 personas that emerge from Mr. Eckert’s texts as that of “an American loner-eccentric, with touches of Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, and Tom Waits.”