Frank Loesser, Jo Swerling, and Abe Burrows | Guys and Dolls / 2015

chance and chemistry

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows (book, based on stories by Damon Runyon), Frank Loesser (music and lyrics) Guys and Dolls / the production I saw, based on The Oregon Shakespeare Festival Production, was performed at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, Beverly Hills, California, at the matinee of December 20, 2015

 

After seeing my third stage production of the renowned Frank Loesser musical, Guys and Dolls, and after watching the Marlon Brando, Jean Simmons, Frank Sinatra, and Vivian Blaine film version dozens of evenings, I almost passed on reviewing my most recent viewing at the Beverly Hills Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts. I wish I’d been writing these cultural memoirs when I saw the famed 1992 Jerry Zaks-directed production in New York, certainly the best version I’ve witnessed to date, if for no other reason than the great Faith Prince performed the character of Miss Adelaide, with the bouncy Nathan Lane as her marriage-phobic lover.

     Although I remember my pleasure at the time of seeing it, I recall little about the earlier, all black cast-production Howard and I saw in 1976 or 1977 at the National Theater in Washington, D.C.

      Vivian Blaine and Stubby Kaye were the stand-outs of the film rendition, but, obviously, you can never ignore Frank Sinatra—even though Nathan Detroit was one of his least memorable roles. And Brandon and Simmons are unforgettable if for no other reason that the film actually allowed them to sing their own songs. Brando, in a sweet tenor voice, almost gets away with it, and Simmons summons up enormous courage in her renditions of “I’ll Know” and “If I Were a Bell.” I can tolerate the shift from “A Bushel and a Peck” to “Pet Me Papa.”  But I miss the full rendering of “My Time of Day” and the songs “I’ve Never Been in Love Before,” “More I Cannot Wish You” and “Marry the Man Today” in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s cinematic adaptation—even while I recognize the last named number is one of the most sexist songs of our entire Broadway musical history.

 

    It’s not that my most recent viewing, a production directed by Mary Zimmerman, first presented by The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, is not worthy. As Zimmerman herself notes in programme commentary, the musical is so near-to-perfect that it is hard to imagine an utterly failed production; even high school and amateur reinterpretations are inherently loveable. The music and, particularly, the lyrics, to say nothing of the larger-than-life character types of Damon Runyon’s stories as captured in Jo Swerling’s and Abe Burrows’ book,* are so perfect that they almost sing and play themselves. And the Oregon production is by no means amateurish.

     If this production’s choreography by Daniel Pelzig leaves something to be desired—wherein the first scenes of the musical are played out simply by moving the small cast in various zig-zag patterns across the stage so to suggest the busy New York streets, and which delimited the remarkable original Michael Kidd narratively sprawling free-for-all during the song “Guys and Dolls” into a vaudevillian duet between Benny Southstreet and Nicely-Nicely Johnson—it redeemed itself sufficiently in the leaping antics “The Crap Shooter’s Dance” of act two.

  

   I might also have done without the small scale models of the New York City sky-line hauled in and out a various moments (a simple appropriate backdrop or projection might have created the locale much more simply), and the tossing out of dozens of beach balls hardly seemed to recreate the Havana of my imagination; but in scenic-designer’s Daniel Ostling’s use of simple chairs and tables to create most of the newspaper and shoe-shine stands, and an easily moveable front facade for the “Save-the-Soul” mission worked just fine as a kind of deconstruction of what some previous productions turned into too-busy moments.

     Despite these these few problems in dance and scene, moreover, the cast completely made up for it. Indeed the entire chorus sang quite admirably, and the leads—Jeremy Peter Johnson as Sky Masterson, Rodney Gardiner as Nathan Detroit, Kate Hurster as Sarah Brown, and, in particular, Robin Goodrin Nordli as Miss Adelaide and Daniel T. Parker and Nicely-Nicely Johnson, were more than capable and often soared in their performances. Both Nordli and Parker knew how to carry their over-their-top characters to the very edge of slapstick and still make these stick-figure-characters somewhat believable in their crowd pleasing, show-stealing numbers, “Adelaide’s Lament” and “Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat.” Johnson blended his strong voice gently with Hurster’s slightly frail upper octaves in “I’ve Never Been in Love Before,” while both singer-actors let go in the lower registers of her “If I Were a Bell” and his “Luck Be a Lady Tonight.” And for one of the first times in my experiences of this work, Gardiner sang and danced in way that totally enlivened the usually whining and passive character of the desperate organizer of gambling venues, Nathan Detroit. Finally, one comprehended, why Adelaide might love him!

     Even though I missed the full resonance of a normal pit orchestra, given the valiant musical orchestrations of the eight musicians—playing piano, reeds (3), trumpet, trombone, drums, and bass only—music director Matt Goodrich is to be equally commended. You know the singers and musicians are doing right by the music when, during the intermission, several Beverly Hills businessmen are still humming the musical’s songs as they make their way to the men’s room and continue therein.

     So what if the play’s central concept—that Runyon’s irascible, hard-talking, gun-packing hoodlums are secretly seeking, despite their personal resolves, the American dream their dolls have cooked up for them—is hard to swallow? So what if this tale takes us to the very edge of credibility in laying open its heart to the possibility of a loose-living gambler falling in love with a strait-laced lady missionary and actually joining her Salvation Army? It’s just a matter, so the work argues, of chance and chemistry—which surely are the very two elements that probably made Loesser’s musical fable one of the most memorable works of the American theater.

     And with those very elements, Guys and Dolls truly gets to the heart of both American innocence and its attraction to violence. Should we be surprised, really, that the religious should be naturally drawn to the evil of our society, that all reprobates are naturally attracted to those who claim moral superiority? When you can claim you’ve “gone straight” by avoiding convictions for 38 arrests, why shouldn’t everyone applaud? After all, we know our justice system is “the very best in the entire world!” Just ask the musical’s totally perplexed Lieutenant Brannigan, whom we meet again, alas, in West Side Story’s Officer Krupke seven years later—albeit under far more serious circumstances.

 

Los Angeles, December 21, 2015

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (December 2015).   

Djuna Barnes | At the Roots of the Stars: The Short Plays / 1995 [reading of plays]

 djuna barnes’ roots

by Douglas Messerli

 

Djuna Barnes At the Roots of the Stars: The Short Plays (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1995)

 

The plays of Djuna Barnes are unquestionably some of the most curious works of American drama. Combining the realist settings and Irish speech patterns of the plays of J. M. Synge, an Oscar Wildeian sense of wit, and an often sentimental portrait of down-and-out New Yorkers, Barnes’s earliest plays are, at best, odd amalgams of styles at war with one another. One must remember that at the time of the earliest plays—The Death of Life, At the Roots of the Stars and Maggie of the Saints—Barnes was 25 years old, and she was clearly seeking models. She had read Synge; she published an article on his drama in the New York Morning Telegraph Sunday Magazine in the weeks between the publication of her first three plays. Family members, on the other hand, purportedly had known Wilde; the family lore was that her great-grandmother had held regular salons which Wilde attended. Mentions of Wilde’s Salomé, in particular, show up in Barnes’s stories and journalistic writings several times. Accordingly, most of Barnes’s early writing for theater, composed at the same time as the fiction she herself described as juvenilia, must be understood as experimentations in which she was working out in dramatic terms the theatrical influences of the day.

     Re-readings of her plays, however, reveal far more interesting achievements than this summary allows. Already in A Passion Play, published in the magazine Others in 1918, but certainly by the time of Three from the Earth (first performed by the Provincetown Players in 1919), Barnes had begun to use a less realistic and more stylized language and action that would lead her in a direction theatrically much closer to her later work. Three from the Earth, for example, uses an almost tableau-like setting in which the three Carson brothers, “peasants of the most obvious type,” crowded together upon a couch, serve primarily as provocateurs for the world of Kate Morley as she recounts her affair with their father. Until the final moment of the play, indeed, there is no action: it is all a dialogue of possession, a war of words between the true inheritors of the father’s love and the woman who has stolen and squandered that love (she is now engaged to a Supreme Court judge). When the youngest son—possibly the offspring of Kate and his father’s union—steals a photograph and a kiss, the subject of the play is actualized, and the kiss simultaneously becomes a visual emblem of Barnes’s theme.

     Similarly, in The Dove, one of Barnes’s most successful plays of this early period, we witness a world not unlike Hedda Gabbler’s of two intelligent sisters’ intense sexual and imaginative frustration. Like Hedda, these women keep weapons, knives and pistols, around them as emblems of danger and excitement, but their primary weapons are their tongues as they wittily spar with one another and the passive girl living with them, whom they have nicknamed “The Dove.” Through the very fact of her youth, however, “The Dove" has the only true potential for danger and excitement and, for that reason, is the central object of their linguistic abuse and desire. Her retaliation—which in Ibsen would have become the subject of tragedy—is treated comically and wholly symbolically by Barnes, as the young boarder puts a bullet-hole through their “scandalous” painting of Venetian courtesans. Once again, Barnes’s action, which in this case occurs offstage, brings the battle of wits into a concretized and static image that completes the play.

     The same pattern of linguistic sparring that results in a visual denouement occurs time and again in these early works: in Kurzy of the Sea the hero’s love for the “unnatural” is transformed into a wholesome sexual drive, as a mermaid, thrown back into the sea, metamorphosizes (again offstage) into a barmaid; the sexual freedom exposed by the castaway couple in Five Thousand Miles is contradicted by the discovery on their uninhabited island of an “eggbeater,” which belies their isolation from civilization and symbolizes the result of any proposed union between them; Gheid Storm’s attempt to sexually storm the walls of Helena Hucksteppe’s self-sufficient disinterest in him and other men is visually presented in To the Dogs by his vaulting through her windowsill, and his failure is realized by his doorway exit. In short, what we see in these early plays are the roots of the tableaux and emblematic structures of the great Nightwood and The Antiphon.

     In several of these plays, Barnes wipes away all action, and explores instead the dialogue of wit. In works such as An Irish Triangle, Little Drops of Rain, Two Ladies Take Tea, Water-Ice, and She Tells Her Daughter, Barnes returns to the Socratic dialogues, one of the roots of theater, in order to push away from a naturalist drama toward a theater in which language, as opposed to setting, character, or thematic structure, dominates. There is no true response possible to Shiela O’Hare’s recounting of the sexual arrangement between her husband and the lady (and/or possibly the lady’s husband) of the manor house; Kathleen’s bourgeois shock is simply a tool to keep the language and her story moving. Mitzi’s outrage against Lady Lookover’s dismissal of her and her generation in Little Drops of Rain simply spurs the witty maxims and homilies of the elder. The daughter’s innocence in She Tells Her Daughter is merely a fact around which Madame Deerfont weaves the tale of her own murderous past. In these plays Barnes has stripped away action and setting in a manner that would be easily at home on the stage of Beckett, Albee, or Pinter. As Barnes biographer Andrew Field has suggested of Barnes’s comedy of 1918, Madame Collects Herself, the play has less to do with influences of the time, particularly those of her fellow playwrights of the Provincetown group—Eugene O’Neill, Susan Glaspell, and Edna St. Vincent Millay—than it does with Eugene Ionesco.

     Unsurprisingly, few critics of the day could make much sense of the plays of Djuna Barnes. While they all seemed to recognize something interesting was happening on stage (or, as Barnes bounded up and down the aisle, offstage), most reviewers were puzzled by the theatrical experience. Alexander Wolcott quipped of Three from the Earth, “[The play] is enormously interesting, and the greatest indoor sport this week is guessing what it means.” Burns Mantle wrote of the same play: “It is probably the incalculable depth of the playlet that puts it beyond us. It is something that should be plumbed. But others must do it. We are a rotten plumber.” Only S. J. Kaufman recognized Barnes’ talent: “Miss Barnes’ play is so near to being great that we hope that we shall be able to see it again. And we hope it’s printed. ...Even now as we write the power, the simplicity and withal the incalculable depth of it has us enthralled.”

     Kaufman did get his wish. Three from the Earth was reprinted in A Little Review and, subsequently, in both Barnes’s A Book and in its republication as A Night Among the Horses in 1929. However, none of these plays has been reprinted since until my edition of At the Roots of the Stars: The Short Plays of 1995.

 

Los Angeles, 1995

Reprinted from Djuna Barnes, At the Roots of the Stars: The Short Plays (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1995)

Arthur Miller | Death of a Salesman / 2012

whatever happened to willy loman?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Arthur Miller Death of a Salesman / New York, Ethel Barrymore Theater; the production I saw was the evening performance of May 4, 2012

 

As Ben Brantley noted in his New York Times review of this revival of the noted American play, Death of a Salesman, one gets shivers from this production from the first rise of the curtain just to be able to see the magnificent set from the original production by Jo Mielziner and hear the original score by Alex North. In some respects, this entire production, directed by the renowned Mike Nichols, seems a bit like a museum piece as the obviously able cast of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Linda Emond, and Andrew Garfield tiptoe through their lines with a kind of muted reverie. One certainly can respect Nichols’ quiet reverence for the great American play, given the many boisterous and mannered productions, such as Dustin Hoffman’s quirky 1984 interpretation (I saw only a filmed version of the play), that have come before it; and, every so often, Nichols’ rendition soars in its dramatic intensity. Andrew Garfield’s tearful embracement of Willy as he admits his life’s failures brings tears to anyone’s eyes who still has the capacity to feel. But for much of the production I felt almost as Willy’s wife, Linda, admits in one of the last lines in the play: “Forgive me, dear. I can’t cry. I don’t know what it is, but I can’t cry.”

 

    Holding back and holding in occasionally gives new meaning to some scenes as well. Hoffman (usually an over-actor who here is utterly demure) plays Willy in the scene where his son Biff (Garfield) visits him on the road only to discover a woman in his room, with devastating understatement, so skillfully in fact that it is hard to believe Biff when he later denies he is holding a grudge against his father. Similarly, the more naturalistic relationship between Willy and his ghost of a brother, Ben (John Glover), gives new resonance to what is usually a booming statement of the new potentials to found in Alaska. Under Nichols’ direction, the missed possibilities of Willy’s life seem never to have been real options, his family and his desire to die like the green-slippered salesman he encountered early his life dominating Loman’s middle-class vision of the world. Here too do we perceive the other son Hap (Finn Witrock) as a kind of latter-day carbon copy of his uncle Ben, a fluttery profligate, perfectly willing to stand-up his dinner appointment with his father as he runs off with the first woman in encounters, only to promise again and again that he will soon marry someone. If mendacity rules the Loman house, he is Willy’s true heir.

 

   But finally, one recognizes, that such a quiet production also allows one to hear all of the play’s many creaks and ghostly moans. It is strange just how “stagey” is Miller’s Death of a Salesman, given that this “realist play” was carefully grounded in everyday life, when compared with the utterly theatrical and highly exaggerated expressionist work of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (a multi-cultural production of which is playing just three blocks away, a version drubbed by the critics). Stanley Kowalski—a worker from the lower class—literally soars as a character into the stratosphere of believable American anti-heroes, while Willy Loman remains, 53 years after his first Broadway appearance, ploddingly grounded to the theater boards out of which he sprung, a concoction of Miller’s deeply impassioned but, nonetheless, theme-driven social consciousness. Despite his wife’s plea that “attention must be paid,” time has turned our heads, and even the middle class which Willy so poignantly represented in 1949 has now nearly disappeared from American society, along with its mythical “American Dream.”* And, in that respect, this play is not only dated, but outdated.

     We might almost conclude that in this one instance Miller was prophetic in his ability to foresee as early as the late 1940s that the remnants of the vast American sales force—so crucial to the advance of capitalism in the early 20th century (and lovingly remembered in musicals such as The Music Man) would ultimately disappear from the American landscape.

    Today I have traveled to New York to spend a few minutes as a publisher with my sales representatives, among the very last of that dinosaur species. Within just a few years, as we know in our bones, all personal sales people will have disappeared, to be replaced with the computer and other as yet unimagined devices. Willy Loman must seem to most younger viewers—very few of whom made up the audience of the Friday evening performance of Miller’s play—as unrecognizable as a typewriter, an obsolete thing of a forgotten past, while the Stanley Kowalskis of the world, outrageously larger-than-life second generation immigrant Koreans, Armenians, Haitians, Mexicans, Russians, Indians, Pakistanis and others—sexually dynamic men and women temporarily locked into poverty—still exist in our cultures by the millions. One might simply summarize the differences between these two mid-20th century US playwrights by saying that while Miller focused on the aspirations of a man seeking a petit-bourgeois existence, Williams—as always, embracing the wretchedly comic outsiders—put all his chips on a man of sweat who preferred to bathe in the sappy fizz of a beer while facing brutal reality.

 

    I suppose, had I been asked to sit down to dinner with either, I’d have chosen Willy—which I almost felt I was doing in attending this production—who, after all, was a coarser version of my own father. But would I have been asked to go to bed with either, I’d have jumped into the sack with Stanley, just like Stella, in the blink of an eye—even if Marlon Brando weren’t playing the role that night. And as far as I'm concerned, that is the important difference between Miller's and Williams’ visions of their relationship to their audiences.

 

*Some of these sentiments, particularly regarding the disappearance of the middle class in relationship to Miller's play where addressed in The New York Times op-ed page essay by Lee Siegel on May 3, 2012, two days before I wrote this essay. However, I did not have the opportunity to read Siegel's piece until after I completed my essay, when, after sharing my sentiments with Susan Bee, she pointed the similarities out to me.

 

New York City, May 5, 2012

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (May 2012). 

Kaija Saariaho and Amin Maalouf | L'Amour de loin / 2016

love across space: the poet as hero

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kaija Saariaho (composer), Amin Maalouf (libretto), L’Amour de loin / The Metropolitan Opera HD-Live production, December 10, 2016 / Howard Fox and I attended this showing at the Century City AMC Theaters

 

Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de loin is only the second work ever by a woman at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, a sad statement made even worse by the fact that the last woman-composed opera was 1903, and shared the credit with a male composer. In conductor Susanna Mälkki, another Finn— who will soon be coming to Los Angeles as the Principal Guest Conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic—Peter Gelb and the MET have made yet further history; there have been only a small handful of women conductors at the Lincoln Center shrine.

      Thankfully this lovely opera with just three characters and chorus will likely mean more out-reach by the MET to find contemporary women and male composers who can combine interesting narratives with exploratory music; and with the enlightened direction of Mälkki, perhaps other women will rise up to replace maestro James Levine.

      That is not to say that Saaiaho’s music is highly experimental: she is no Iannis Xenakis or even John Cage. Her work lies closer to Philip Glass, but with a highly shimmering quality that can be traced back to Debussy and Messiaen, a quality she shares with younger contemporary American composers such as Missy Mazzoli. Yet, as Deborah Voigt commented in introducing yesterday’s performance, Saariaho’s work is very much her own voice.

      After his seemingly maniacal and almost menacing use of a vast stage machine in Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung a few years ago, Robert Lepage, working with Michael Curry, has here created a sea of thousands of small LED lights strung at various heights, and which, in their luminescent flickers, quite match the musical score.

 

     The central figures, the 12th century Aquitaine troubadour poet, Jaufré Rudel, Prince of Blaye (Eric Owens) and Clémance (Susanna Phillips) spend most of the opera on a fork-lift kind of machine that moves, like the MET’s own HD camera, in numerous directions, representing the outcrops of land that meet up with the endless sea upon which the Pilgrim (Tamara Mumford) voyages back and forth between Aquitaine and Tripoli.

       Tired of years of joyful singing and partying, Rudel, at the opening of this opera, is ready to explore a new kind of life, a love that, much like Wagner’s representation of love in Tristan and Isolde, is pure—love for someone beautifully exotic and, even more importantly, far off. It is, in fact, the kind of love many Westerner’s developed with Asia and Arabic countries throughout history, a love of something the lover imagines as representing strange ecstasy (not so dissimilar from the Isabelle Eberhart as portrayed in Mizzoli’s opera, Song from the Uproar, or, in literature, the Bowles’ devotion to Morocco).

       Endlessly traveling, the Pilgrim (herself a kind of androgynous figure who links these two worlds and brings a quite sensuous story-telling to Aquitaine) tells Rudel that there is indeed such a woman, who lives in Tripoli; and the poet, touched by the Pilgrim’s descriptions, quickly sets about writing songs to his new idealized love, beautiful pieces which the Pilgrim conveys—despite Rudel’s displeasure—to Clémance as well.

      For her part, Clémance is not sure that she can at all live up to the stranger’s visions of her, yet she is touched by this totally abstract love, yet also wishing that she might see her distant lover as he declares such passionate and pure thoughts.

      Of course, opera divas throughout history have been wooed through their lover’s ballads, but few operas have put poetry and the poet himself in such a lofty position. And I laughed inwardly at the thought of a “Poet as Hero” in a world such as ours, in which the poet is seen more as an effete fool.

 

      But Rudel might also be described as a kind of effete fool, who, after hearing of the faraway lover’s enjoyment of the Pilgrim’s summary of his “perfect” poems, suddenly begins to long for actually seeing Clémance and possibly consummating his now encompassing love.

    Unfortunately, traveling across the shimmering waters, which change color from moment to moment, he grows ill, and by the time he and the Pilgrim arrive in Tripoli, he is near death.

       Despite that, men carry him on a palette to her home, and briefly revived, he sings of his love for Clémance, and she for him. In the last throes of dying, he praises his fortune for simply having been able to hold her near him and accept a kiss.

 

      Clémance, now truly in love with this pure soul, prays to God for his survival; and when he soon dies, she curses Christ for not saving the hero, arousing the wrath of her local community fearing that her blasphemy might result on the wrath of God.

        Gradually, the now chastised Clémance, determined to enter a convent, begins to perceive that her new relationship with the distant God is analogous to the faraway love she has had previously with Rudel. She is, as all religious novitiates must become, now ready to “marry” God and to serve him from “afar.”

       The singing by all three leads and the chorus was quite glorious, and despite some slow moments, the music seldom failed to create a sense of wonderment.

       By the end of this beautiful opera, it became clear that Lebanese-French writer Amin Maalouf’s libretto was not only about love from afar, but about imagination and perception, about a love of something and someone outside of one’s own experiences, a love of the other and difference—important reminders in this time of increasing demand for the likeness and sameness of our culture and lives.

 

Los Angeles, December 11, 2016

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (December 2016).

Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally | Dead Man Walking / 2015

the face of god

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jake Heggie (composer), Terrence McNally (libretto, based on the book by Sister Helen Prejean), Dead Man Walking / Santa Monica, California, The Broad Stage, Santa Monica College Performing Arts Center, Sunday, March 8, 2015

 

Jake Heggie’s opera Dead Man Walking, based on the book by Sister Helen Prejean and the 1995 movie directed by Tim Robbins, is a powerful and incredibly moving work that in its intensity is also somewhat difficult to endure. If by the end of the first act, one feels worn out as the result of the story’s horror and sorrow and the demands of its audience’s empathy and tears, by the opera’s end, whether or not one is convinced of the transformative power of human and spiritual love, one is still left with a third corpse on stage which the society itself—and the audience as part of that society—has allowed to happen. No matter what one feels about capital punishment, and its justification for an act that so brutally left two young adults dead, one cannot but find it difficult to match the faith and generosity of heart expressed by the work’s major character, Sister Helen and the seemingly inexhaustibility of the singer, Jennifer Rivera.

      Heggie’s soaring and roiling score (which, fortunately, only occasionally borders on well-written film music) and Terence McNally’s well-honed script is somewhat manipulative. And even from its earliest scenes of The Prologue the opera understandably sanitizes the rape of the young girl, the shooting of the young boy, and the numerous stabbings of the girl after she screams in reaction to the boy’s death.

      Despite the operatic nudity of its characters and a quite literal enactment of rape, no amount of balletic simulation can capture the crude monstrousness of the original act. And, accordingly, particularly since we are haunted with the ghosts of these two beautiful children throughout the rest of the opera, the dramatization cannot fully signify the loss and horror later claimed by the parents and friends. And no matter how horrible we know the murderer, Joseph De Rocher (Michael Mayes) to be, we are able to more fully sympathize with him than we possibly could be in “real” life. Although Michael Mayes as Joseph, quite brilliantly, through both voice and theatrical interpretation, conveys the original’s hubristic dismissal of all guilt while yet embracing of “the bad man” he recognizes himself to be, a singing jailbird, even one heavily tattooed and coarse, is simply not as horrifying as a disdainful, swearing survivor waiting out his end in the Louisiana prison in Angola. Indeed, given the character’s swagger, we have difficulties in comprehending his terrifying fear of death, and his determination to request his new epistolary pen-pal, the naïve Sister Helen, to be his spiritual survivor.

 

     The composer and writer also stack the deck more than a little by beginning the opera in the children’s mission where Helen, along with Sisters Rose (the powerfully-voiced Talise Trevigne), Catherine and Lilianne, work with their children in near-perfect harmony as they sing out the spiritual, “He Will Gather Us Around Him”—which gradually becomes an anthem for Helen throughout the rest of the opera. Strangely, and I am sure unintentionally, such a joyful presentation of her life among the obviously socially and financially disadvantaged children, suggests why this loveable being might have gone looking for new challenges, quickly made apparent in her decision to meet with the much-hated prisoner. Despite the assertion of Rosie and others that Helen should stay at home and minister to those who daily need her, the nun-on-the-run (as Heggie engagingly described her in a pre-opera discussion), is determined to challenge herself by encountering a real evil that the audience does not yet completely comprehend.

     Accordingly, her long trip to Angola, which becomes a kind of metaphorical journey into hell, and which is quickly transformed into a symbolic voyage to love and God, seems overlong and a bit inexplicable. It is only when she finally arrives at the prison and meets with the cynical and rather ungodly prison Chaplin Father Grenville (John Duykers) and the head warden that we begin to perceive the horrific world in which she has become involved.

     The pared-down production at the Broad theater used moveable prison gates to suggestively convey not only a much larger prison community but, by keeping the scenery in constant motion, recreated the psychological dimensions of a woman (and this a case a previously secluded woman) being suddenly tossed into a world of violent, testosterone-driven, and despairing men. If she is terrified, Helen is also drawn to this desolate spot to prove her own “marriage” to God.

     In fact, however, it is not the prisoners who become her biggest challenges, but their families, both De Rocher’s obviously lower class mother (performed by the remarkable Catherine Cook) and her other children—who equally turn to Helen for spiritual support—but the horrifyingly cold-hearted and intensely angry parents of the dead children, dramatically realized by Robert Orth as Owen Hart, the father of the murdered girl, reprising his original role. By the time Helen determines to stand by Joseph through the inevitably failed hearing to spare his life, the sides have been drawn and, whether or not she has determined to stand with or against this horrible sinner, she is clearly made to feel that she has chosen to join forces with the devil instead of God.

   If the opera, heretofore, has alternated between soaring arias of hope and belief and dour proclamations of doubt and eternal sorrow, it now bursts into a cacophonous chorus of impossible disharmony, as Helen falls into a faint, famished from not only a failure to eat but out of the real possibility that her faith is insufficient to heal the huge gash in the human weal De Rocher has left behind.

     The audience members seemed almost stunned as they stumbled to the restrooms during the intermission. Surely the opera had no choice to be release them from the tears it had revealed in Act I. Yet Act II begins with both central figures suffering terrible dreams, De Rocher terrified of now being “a dead man walking,” and Helen conjuring up the ghosts of his victims. Once more Sister Rose attempts to not only allay Helen’s fears but to allow her a way out of the box of commitment into which she has allowed herself to be entrapped. Yet suddenly, after Helen speaks of difficultly of forgiveness, Rose grows into a full dimensional figure as she proffers the possibility that Helen has, herself, not yet fully forgiven Joseph De Rocher for his sins. Her aria suggesting that such nonjudgmental love is almost always one without words is perhaps one the most beautiful in an opera of high lyrical intensity. And it is Rose’s advice upon which the remainder of the opera pivots. How, we wonder, will Helen find a way to forgive someone who not only does not seek forgiveness, but refuses to forgive himself by remaining in a shell of self-denial, blaming his brother for his own horrific actions.

       While the first act represented a nightmarish voyage for all its figures, the second act attempts to reveal, often in very small increments, how that nightmare might come unwound and even redeem some of the many sufferers of these traumatic events. If Rose has described how mothers show their children how they love and forgive, Joseph’s rather inarticulate mother stunningly articulates her love by refusing to see her son as the murderous adult he now is, endowing him instead with all the memories she has of him as a porpoise-like child (the porpoise itself being a standard Christian symbol of God and God’s love). Her simple request for a family photograph is so poignantly painful in its ridiculous attempt to commemorate what everyone would want forgotten, that director Brian Staufenbiel, turns the scene into a long frieze that emblematizes the moment—revealing it for the folly and desire for a normative life made clearly impossible by social, cultural, and political events. If there was one moment in this opera that spoke out against the absurdity of taking a human life in order to demonstrate society’s horror of murder, it was this. For in that single snapshot, life becomes eternal; a dead man does not exist in a work of art, however ordinary it is, and even if that artifact is destroyed or lost.

    Stubborn to the end, Helen ultimately forces the frightened prisoner to confess, in her mind, freeing him to be forgiven by God. But, in fact, his confession, as he has argued all along, does not free him as much as it frees her and all the others against whom he has so transgressed. She is now able to truly forgive him. But her expression of that forgiveness is not in a touch, a silent act, a reiterated gentility, but in her insistence that she herself is the embodiment of God, and that in his greatest moment of fear, if he only look into her face, he will see love—which, ultimately, in this work, is the same as God.

    In short, Sister Helen, instead of mystifying the presence of God, has, almost in an act of apostasy, turned the Holy into a kind of graven image, her own. But this work is not, fortunately, a religious text. And we can, of course, forgive her in the fact that she has humanized the mysterious presence Who cannot be named? His name is legion, and He is us. Such a secular theology, finally, is one we can all, even the most reprehensible among us, embrace.

 

Los Angeles, March 10, 2015

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (March 2015).