forces of gravity
by Douglas Messerli
Giovanni Francesco Busenello
(libretto), Francesco Cavalli (music), additional text: Terrore nello spazio (Planet
of the Vampires), a film by Mario Bava, 1965 and Queen of Outer Space, a film by Edward Bernds, 1958 La Didone / Redcat (Roy and Edna
Disney-CalArts Theater), Los Angeles / the performance I saw was on June 14,
2009
Known for its innovative retellings
of major dramas and events (Hamlet, The
Hairy Ape, The Emperor Jones, etc.) The Wooster Group has moved into even
more challenging territory with their newest extravaganza, La Didone, a retelling, in operatic form, of Francesco Cavalli's
1641 opera of the Carthagian Queen Dido and her new lover, Aeneas.
Not only has director Elizabeth LeCompte taken on the challenges of
opera in this work, but has overlaid the Cavalli work (unknown to most
opera-goers) with a grade-B science fiction story, directed by the Italian film
maker Mario Bava, Terrore nello spazio,
known in this country as Planet of the
Vampires. The film has it fans, Ridley Scott among them, whose film Alien was obviously influenced by this
campy movie.
On some levels it seems quite justifiable—and may have appeared to be
absolutely "brilliant" in the early inception of the work—to bring
the two, what used to be called "high culture" and "low
culture" together, allowing them to comment on each other and to elucidate
related themes. Both worlds, Dido's Carthage and the planet Aura, are visited
by outsiders: Aeneas, prince of Troy, washes up upon the shores of Africa after
a deadly sea storm; the spaceships Argos and Galliot, investigating mysterious
signals coming from Aura, are caught in a force of gravity and plummet quickly
to the new planet's surface, the Galliot destroyed in the process.
That same kind of gravitational pull seems to happen to Aeneas, as Cupid
(disguised as Aeneas' son Ascanius) plunges an arrow into Dido's breast, who,
having remained true to her the memory of her dead husband, suddenly finds
herself madly in love with the visiting stranger.
The worlds for both sets of explorers suddenly shifts, as the remaining
members of the Argos crew senses strange beings around them who they cannot
see, and Aeneas is drawn into a boar hunt—presented almost as a frenzied sexual
prelude—during which he and Dido retire to a cave to make love.
The inhabitants of the planet Aura, in turns out, are invisible beings
whose sun is dying, and who can survive only by taking over the bodies of their
visitors. As in Invasion of the Body
Snatchers, these beings become
the people whose bodies they invade; and, as the now-repaired Argos takes off
into space, there appears to be only one "real" survivor left, the
others having been transformed to Aurans.
Similarly, Dido hopes by conquering the heart of Aeneas to lure him into
Carthage society. But the gods call him back to Italy, and Dido is left alone
with a broken heart. In the Aeneid she
commits suicide, but in Cavalli's version, she regains her sanity, marrying the
nearby King Jarbas, who has long been in love with her.
The Argonauts, in a Rod Serling-like plot development, realizing they do
not have the energy to return home, choose a planet on which to settle: the
third planet from the sun. We realize that either we are already the ancestors
of these alien zombies or are about to be invaded.
As always, The Wooster Group performs all of this lunacy with great
seriousness, and that, in turn, saves most of this work from simply becoming
camp. The singing, particularly Hai-Ting Chinn's Dido, John Young's Aeneas, and
Andrew Nolen's Jarbas, was excellent and entices one to see the complete
Cavalli opera (the original lasts 4-5 hours, while this production ran for
about an hour and a half). Yet for all of the bravado and talent of the
company, there remained something about the production that left one feeling
that the connections were frail and facile.
Certainly, it challenged its audience. Just the attempt to keep two
simultaneous stories—the one in Italian, the other in a quietly-spoken film
jargon—both of whose words often scrolled quickly forward at the same moment
that computer screens deliver up various images, was, as Los Angeles Times theater critic Charles McNulty described it,
"an exhausting cerebral spin." Experienced often enough, such
intellectual activity could possibly save one from early dementia.
Yet, at heart, I felt this work was intellectually empty, and
spiritually had no real soul. The laughter it evoked was from the bland sci-fi
jargon ("How do we repair the meteor rejector, Mark?), while the delight
it offered was only of the musical sort. Between the two lay a hollow art.
Los Angeles, June 18, 2009
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (June 2009).
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