architecture saves the day
by Douglas Messerli
Annie Gosfield (composer), Yuval
Sharon (adaption and director) War of
the Worlds, conducted by Christopher Roundtree (conductor) / the
performance Howard Fox and I attended was the matinee at the Walt Disney
Concert Hall on November 18, 2017
As a 7-year-old child, my husband
Howard walked the few blocks from his Margate, Atlantic City house to the local
movie theater to watch the film, War of
the Worlds. Suddenly he found himself in the midst of a fantasy that
utterly terrified him, and hid himself (in the 1950s school-taught procedure of
“duck and cover”) under the theater seat in horror of what he was seeing on the
screen. On the way back home he actually “saw,” so he believed a Martian in the
neighbor’s back yard, and for weeks after had horrifying dreams.
Yesterday’s matinee performance of the opera at the Walt Disney Concert
Hall of War of the Worlds, with music
by Annie Gosfield, and directed by Yuval Sharon was neither that scary nor even
eerie, except for its occasional strains of Joanne Pearce Martin’s Theremin
playing.
Introduced by actress Sigourney Weaver, the small orchestral ensemble
begins almost as a riff on Gustav Holst’s The
Planets, with what even the program suggests is a “sweet piece” subtitled
“Mercury,” to be interrupted midway by Weaver’s return to report to the
audience some “breaking news”: “It seems that several unexplained explosions
were observed in the sky over Los Angeles.” “Don’t panic,” she adds, “it
doesn’t appear to be a terrorist attack, but scientists are describing it as
explosions of incandescent gas originating from the planet Mars….”
The performance of “Mercury” completed, the orchestra moves on to
“Venus,” until suddenly there is a heavy rumbling overhead, followed with
another Weaver interruption and a piped-in interview with a Professor Pierson
giving first hand evidence of the “invasion” from across the street at the
Tinkertoy Parking Lot (there were at least two other locations around town,
centered about spots in which the director and composer had found pre-existing
city sirens, which were brought back to life and took the concert-hall music to
the streets).
After the conversation, Weaver again leaves the stage, and the orchestra
continues with “Venus,” until it is again interrupted—although continuing
quietly in the background—this time for a another on-the-street report with Dr.
Melissa Morse, KCRW’s head meteorologist, who interviews a Spanish speaking
citizen named Mrs. Martinez, who has evidently witnessed the crash of another
of the Martian spacecrafts.
More rumbles occur, as the orchestra continues with “Earth,” as well as
more interruptions, this time from a General Lansing and, soon after, a message
from the Secretary of the Interior, who not only reports that several of
Martian crafts have been discovered around Los Angeles, but have also begun
appearing in other states such as “Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania” (to
which the concert audience heartily laughed, recognizing that these were the
very states that helped Trump win the election). Bells begin ringing, and
Pierson reports that the streets “are all jammed” (which indeed, at least on
Bunker Hill, they had been pre-performance, forcing us to park in the very same
Tinkertoy Parking Lot from which he was evidently broadcasting). Even Los
Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti cannot do anything to save the city. And only the
titanium cover in which Frank Gehry enwrapped the theater in which we sat,
saved those of us within. It appears that in this version of H. G. Wells’
fable, architecture, not oxygen, has saved the day.
Throughout these interchanges, a bit
higher up from where the orchestra is playing behind an inexplicably Plexiglas-covered
box, a Martian-like creature (the stunning Hila Plitmann), who sings in an
incomprehensible language at the very highest ranges of her soprano voice while
dressed in a bright-red cocktail gown. Her ability to draw in the words into a
marvelous mumble-jumble of sounds, reminded me some of the performance I had
seen the previous night sung by Joanna Dudley in William Kentridge’s opera, Refuse the Hour; and this opera, as
well, is very much about time and space.
Yuvall argued that what he and Gosfield
were attempting to do in adapting the original Orson Welles radio production of
War of the Worlds was to bring up the
issues of fake and real news—a notable project for our very confusing times,
when it appears an American election might have been decided by the willingness
of numerous naïve US citizens to believe Russian propaganda and outright
campaign lies.
Yet, it would be hard to imagine that anyone, at least sitting in the
large audience at the Walt Disney Hall, was convinced by the so-called “hoax.”
As a presumably polite and informed company of Los Angeles citizens, we could
sit back and enjoy the ploys of the fiction. And this, in turn, took away much
of the serious drama of both the original broadcast—during which hundreds of
people did, in fact, panic, and run into the streets—and the film which
terrorized the boyhood of my companion. This time around, War of the Worlds seemed more comic than terrifying, and the sci-fi
fictional quality of the original was almost meaningless.
But, one does have to admit, as a contemporary opera it is still a “blast”
into a time and space to the audience obviously was quite pleased to have
traveled.
Los Angeles, November 19, 2017
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (November 2017).
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