Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne (adaptation from the play, The Mahabharata, by Jean-Claude Carrière) | Battlefield / 2017

going on

by Douglas Messerli

 

Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne (adaptation from the play, The Mahabharata, by Jean-Claude Carrière) and directors Battlefield / Beverly Hills, the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, the performance I attended was the matinee on Saturday, May 27, 2017

 

After productions in New York, San Francisco, and elsewhere, Peter Brook’s most recent work, Battlefield, has now moved in for a short, 4-day run at Beverly Hills’ Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts.

      In some respects, this seems less like a new work than a kind of extension, or epilogue, to Brook’s epic 1987 work The Mahabharata, a nine-hour spectacle that had such a large cast that, when it was performed in Los Angeles, was staged at the Raleigh film sound studio.

      Like that epic-event, in this new Brook worked with long-term collaborator, Marie-Hélène Estienne, adapting the play by the noted writer Jean-Claude Carrière (who collaborated with Luis Buñuel on several films and wrote the scripts for dozens of others, including The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Tin Drum, and Valmont); but as the years have passed Brook and Estienne have shifted their focus from large to small, moving increasingly to a kind minimalist purity.

       Battlefield runs just over 1-hour, and it’s sets consist primarily of few slender wooden poles lined up in a row along the back of the stage; there are only four actors, dressed primarily in colorful robes which they don to differentiate the various roles they undertake. Instead of the large chorus of instruments employed in The Mahabharata, there is a single drummer, Toshi Tsuchitori, who performed as well in that earlier production.

       Yet for all of this stripping away of extraneous detail, Battlefield does not feel simplistic or constrained. In fact, it carries with it all the terrifying details the great battle before it which has killed millions, including nearly all of Yudhishthira’s (Jared McNeill), family, along with his greatest enemy, whom his mother Kunti (Carole Karemera) reveals early in the play was actually his brother, born with her in a liaison with the sun.

       Yudhishthira, overwhelmed with the grief of all those deaths, is determined to enter the woods in penance for his destruction of so many lives, but his father (Sean O’Callaghan) and his mother insist he must carry on as the new King, suggesting that he visit his grandfather, the elderly and soon-to-die Dritarashtra (Ery Nzaramba), who, in a series, of parables and gnomic statements, impresses upon his grandson the cyclic nature of war and peace, of love and violence. What has just happened will ultimately happen again and again, and is not entirely the fault of those involved but simply a product of their destinies. Much as in Beckett’s works, Yudhishthira is a man who cannot “go on,” but must go on nonetheless.

     Finally convinced to take up the crown, Yudhishthira gives away all his personal goods and wealth to the priests, but is advised, instead, by his royal counsel, to give everything to the poor. One of the most charming episodes of the play is when, after gathering up all the robes upon the stage, the counsel attempts to give them away to the poor, a difficult thing to do to the front-row patrons of the Beverly Hills theater. Giving up on asking whether any them are poor, the counsel asks only if they might know someone who is poor.

       Other crises follow, and there are further engaging parables, one between Destiny and Time, who argue about a snake that just killed a child; Time wants to kill the snake, but Destiny successfully argues that the snake was only doing what a snake does and therefore should be allowed to escape alive.

      In another such parable, a worm is terrified to cross a road, desiring to remain alive in the world, even though he, in his former life a cheating man, has been punished by becoming just who he is. Time argues that he has no choice but to cross the road, even if a speeding chariot might crush him, and the worm is convinced to move forward; he is, of course, crushed.

      In a third such scenario, a just prince, after promising to save a pigeon, gives away parts of his own body equal to the size of the pigeon to a falcon who demands to feast upon his prey. Having finally given up his entire body, both the falcon and the pigeon praise the now dead prince as being the most just man in the universe.

       There is, in short, no answers provided for the horrible events that The Mahabharata chronicle; there is only the consolation of moving forward. While his mother and father determine to do penance by moving off into the woods, to live on roots and fruits, Yudhishthira has no choice but to rule for the 36 years that have been pre-ordained, and to do the very best he can do in his position.

       After all the roar of the battlefield, his rule is a time of silence, of sorrow, of regret, and reunification—reasons we can all use now as we once again hear the refrains of  “us” and “them,” of the differences between people who are, after all, simply our brothers.

       What Brook’s new work reveals is that, after the smoke has cleared and the bodies carried off, there can never be losers and winners; only fate itself remains. Lamentations have no meaning; only the knowledge of what life is and isn’t matters to those given the task to go on living.

       If this play is simple in its storytelling, it is made profound by the brilliant acting the entire cast. With their quiet voices, their every word was clearly to be heard, and only the beat of life played out on Tsuchitori’s drum had the ability to drown out their musings. But that is, obviously, life’s prerogative, as it gradually kills off all of the fears, absurdities, and contemplations of the living.

 

Los Angeles, May 28, 2017

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera and Performance (May 2017).

Lucas Hnath | The Christians / 2016

what does it mean to believe?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lucas Hnath The Christians / Los Angeles, Mark Taper Forum, the performance I saw was a matinee on January 9, 2016

 

 Everything seems in good shape for the megachurch congregation and its minister in Lucas Hnath’s play The Christians. The large church, with thousands of seats, a baptismal font as big as a swimming pool, and a parking so large you can easily get lost, has finally been paid for, while pews are nearly filled with believers led by the lively chorus with which the play begins. As pastor Paul (Andrew Garman) begins his sermon, you can almost hear the churchgoers settle in to enjoy his benevolent words.

        But the sermon on this Sunday, presented in four parts, we soon perceive, is something different. With his wife, Elizabeth (Linda Powell), his associate pastor Joshua (Larry Powell), and church elder (Philip Kerr) sitting on the plush chairs beside him, Paul tells the story of missionary friend in Africa who tells of a building that has been attacked by terrorists going up in flames. Suddenly a young boy plunged into the burning building and brought out a child, evidently his sister, into safety. But the boy himself was burning and quickly died. The missionary explains how sad he was that this young hero, whom he had never been able to convert, will never go to Heaven and be condemned to Hell.

       The friends’ story troubles pastor Paul, and over the last many months or years he has apparently pondered over the problem of why God would not admit such a being simply because he had not converted to a Christian religion. Searching and rereading his Bible, Paul finds no actual words of description of Hell in the Biblical texts themselves. Gehenna—the only specific reference he can find to anything like the idea of Hell—he explains, was a word that the Jews used to describe a kind of refuge dump (actually my Biblical dictionary describes it as the valley near Jerusalem where apostate Israelites, such as those who worshiped Moloch, and burnt their children as sacrifice to the God, lived). Why then do his fellow believers persist in their conviction that those who are not saved will surely be punished by the devil. Christ, he argues, came to save all men, not just those who believed in him.

      The congregation remains silent, but the associate pastor, Joshua, after delivering the usual prayer, cannot remain still, expressing his shock for his associate’s expression of what he perceives as an obvious heretical position. He argues that although the congregation has remained quiet, a large number of its members will surely disagree with Paul’s hermeneutical expression. Paul suggests a collection plate vote, discovering that at least 50 individuals are immediately ready to side with Joshua, and soon after Joshua and those parishioners leave the church. 

     After the service, the elder takes him aside to further discuss the schism Paul has created, worrying deeply about the ability of the church to survive if it loses more of its congregation, which, indeed, soon happens.

        A young congregant, Jenny (Emily Donahoe), who is raising a son alone, publically challenges her pastor by asking if, given his views, Hitler is also in heaven. If someone were to murder her son, she asks, would he also be saved in Heaven?

       Paul has no choice, given his position, but to admit that they too would be heaven. All mankind has been saved, not just those we as humans might choose. When she argues that his is an irrational view, he posits that his God is beyond human rationality, is something larger, more incomprehensible than the human mind can accept. His God, he suggests, must encompass more than the human mind can comprehend.

       But why, Jenny challenges, did he wait until the church was paid for to express his views. Had he, in fact, determined to share his revelations only when it became convenient to do so?

       As the formerly megachurch continues to lose its members and their money, Paul’s wife Elizabeth finally challenges him herself. Why hadn’t he bothered to share his intellectual struggle with her? Why had the man she trusted and loved kept his ideas to himself? And how far, she wonders, will he go to in order to maintain his new viewpoints? Is he willing to possibly lose even her, since she also disagrees with his readings of the Biblical texts?

       In Hnath’s thoughtful play, Paul cannot answer some of these questions; he can only beg that Elizabeth stay, and hope that in his new preaching, he will not lose everyone.

       Even the playwright, like his central character, refuses to provide an answer or to reveal what he might believe. Although Hnath grew up in just such a congregation, with a mother who attended a seminary and expected that he, too, might go on to preach, he felt that he did not want to be responsible for telling others what and how to believe.

       His play, accordingly, asks questions instead of providing simple answers. And in that fact, The Christians is a work that does not use its own title to challenge of demean those who do believe.

       If one might have wished that Hnath took his argument just a bit further, questioning even the idea of Heaven, positing the possibility, as a reformer like Calvin did, that what he describe has heaven and hell exist only here on earth, one cannot diminish the profundity of the questions his play does pose.

       Personally, I was put off by the director’s (or author’s) decision to present these issues to the audience by means of microphone; yes, we know that the evangelical preacher’s use these devices to raise their voices to the rafters; but in the intimate Mark Taper Forum, where actor’s voices easily carry, it seems somewhat off-putting to direct all conversations through electronical means. I was somewhat amused that a large number of the elderly audience had purchased hearing devices, when, surely, even the deaf might have heard every word of this production.

       Moreover, the microphones delimit the movement of characters, who, tied to their chords, find it difficult, at times, to move more than a few feet, which helps to reiterate that Hnath’s play was, primarily, a didactic dialogue.

       But I have nothing against such dialogues, particularly when they ask for their audiences simply to listen and weigh the meaning of the character’s pronouncements on such important issues as belief and doubt.

       Unfortunately, it appears that some audience members saw the play as a testimony for belief itself. A friend asked me, after the play, “Did it make you believe?”

       “No,” I replied, “I remain a non-believer. Although I grew up in a church, I find such beliefs somewhat repugnant and dangerous in a world that continues to use religion and culture as something to segregate and cut themselves off from others.” But I also don’t feel that Hnath’s play demanded that you should believe in either Paul’s gentle epistle or Joshua’s roaring blare of disregard. Rather, the playwright asked those who might believe—and even those, like me, who find they cannot—to ask some serious questions. What does it mean to believe, and how does any belief exclude others: simple questions we should perhaps daily ask.

 

Los Angeles, January 11, 2016

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

Richard Strauss and Oscar Wilde | Salome / 2017

o terrible night

by Douglas Messerli

 

Oscar Wilde (as translated by Hedwig Lachmann, libretto), Richard Strauss Salome / LAOpera, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion / the performance Howard Fox and I saw was the matinee performance on March 19, 2017, the opera’s last performance of this work

 

The last time I saw a production of Richard Strauss’ wonderful Salome was in October 2008, an HD live showing of the Met production with the fabulous Karita Mattila (see My Year 2002: Love, Death, and Transfiguration). I wrote highly of that production, yet pointing out that Mattila’s “Dance of the Seven Veils,” given her girth, was a bit troublesome, and the final barring of her breasts was cut from the theater-goers vision.

      Now at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, and performed by LAOpera, we have an even better production, with the wondrous Patricia Racette displaying a Salome that more thoroughly suggests the young, teenage girl that Salome actually was, a young princess, just beginning to perceive her sexual powers.

       All in this production’s cast members were quite excellent, but one must give particular kudos to Issachah Savage as Narbaboth, Tómas Tómasson, as the cistern-jailed Nochanaan, and Allan Glassman, as Herod. Gabriele Schnaut, when we could hear her voice in the first balcony, seemed equally talented, but that was the problem with much of the other singing; as director James Conlon joked in the preview conversation with the audience, you will be able to hear the singers 90% of the time!

       But what was lost in the singing, was certainly made up for in the acting and in the beautiful abstract set by John Bury (and here being in the balcony was an advantage, since we could quite clearly see the stunningly tiled floor, presumably on the upper roof of Herod’s villa).

      Racette, performing her notorious dance with four male dancers, was able to make the event a truly spectacular and sexual experience, the leering Herod lounging on pillows while he lusts have his wife’s daughter.

      If the following scene where, after finally getting her way, Salome dances with and kisses the severed head of the prophet, is rather overlong, it nonetheless allowed Racette to once more display the child-like confusions of this now mad girl, who obviously does not quite comprehend death, believing that in her kisses the man who has seen God might open his eyes and finally see her beauty. It is, of course, not Nochanaan with who she is truly in love, but with the idea of herself and her power over men. In this world where power means everything, she has never learned that there is no real power possible between true lovers. And once she has had her would-be lover killed she is left not only without love but, as in the Tristan and Isolde myth, without life.

      Yet power does win out, in an unexpected way, in this production. Although both Howard and I have long been devoted to Conlon’s astute conducting, we have also, when I look back on my reviews of LAOpera productions, often complained about the lack of richness and sonority of the Opera orchestra. We have always blamed that on the poor acoustics of the hall. But here, with a far larger orchestra that projected further out into the hall, Conlon as his colleagues truly shined, all of Strauss’ glorious music filling the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and shimmering over everything, even in its dense chordal clashes. This time, not only was the popular Conlon applauded, but the entire orchestra was accorded applause in the curtain call again and again. And if, at times, Oscar Wilde’s heavily brocaded words seemed slightly dated, Strauss’ music, even as influenced as it is always by Wagner, seemed miraculously alive and fresh. I do hope there was a recording of this production so that I might enjoy it again and again.

      This year I have chosen the notion of barbarians at the gate to be at the center of my studies; and there is no better example of this than Wilde’s and Strauss’ opera of 1905. Although the people of Herod’s court are terrified of the outside, of the Jewish community living outside its gates and, even more so, of the new Messiah wandering throughout the land—each of the characters at one time or another, declare that they are fearful that something terrible will happen during this very evening—which is why, in part, they have arrested John the Baptist, Jochanaan. We soon learn, however, that the terrible thing that will happen this evening will come from inside, through the hands of all of Herod’s court, and not from outside. Ignorance, sexual obsession, pride, and power all emanate from and gather around these figures to bring their world to an end. Even the crude and lustful Herod, ultimately, cannot abide the world he has helped to create, and orders the beautiful young girl with which he is so enchanted, to be killed, in so doing, not so very differently from Wagner’s Wotan, declaring his own destruction as well.

 

Los Angeles, March 20, 2017

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (March 2017).

Henrik Ibsen | Ghosts / 2022

zombies

by Douglas Messerli

 

Henrik Ibsen Ghosts, adapted by Richard Eyre / directed by Bart DeLorenzo, Los Angeles, Odyssey Theatre Ensemble / the performance I attended was on September 18, 2022

As director Bart DeLorenzo writes in his short introduction to the program for the current production of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, now running through October 23rd at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble:

“I feel that 2022 is a kind of ‘after’ moment. Like we’re crawling out of the wreckage and we can finally look around at all the damaged, collapsed structures that have never supported what we want out of our world. And we can maybe see more clearly how we’re continuing to hurt each other and how we might progress. Like Oswald in the play, we’re asking the past, ”What kind of life have you given me? And as we rethink and remake our world, maybe we can begin differently.”

     To me, at least, appears that these days we are only digging in deeper into our own ghosts, haunting our own horrible pasts. The central subjects of Ibsen’s 1881 play read like headline banners of our tabloids and our entertainment news stations—as translator Richard Eyre reiterates them: the problems and effects of patriarchy and class distinctions, free love, prostitution, religious hypocrisy, heredity, incest, and euthanasia.

     These obviously, were subjects that got Ibsen’s play Gengangere rejected for production by nearly all Scandinavian theaters—the play had its premier with a Danish touring group in Chicago in 1882—performed finally in Norway in 1883. Even the King of Sweden told Ibsen that it was not a good play. It was banned in England, just as today books with far lesser controversial subjects are being banned from libraries and schools all over the US.

     But even more disturbing than his outre subjects, perhaps, was his play’s unmitigated attack on bourgeois social and religious values, values still held by millions throughout the world and certainly in our country in this time of the rising pressures of conservative thought. Reverend Manders (here played by Barry Del Sherman) condemns nearly everything with which he comes in contact in the home of Helene Alving (Pamela J. Gray), from the books on social economics and women’s independence, to the way Helene has raised—or perhaps we should say, “not cared properly”—for her son, Oswald (Alex Barlas), having sent him away early to live in Paris to remove from the evils of her own home.

      Manders dismisses the books even if he has never read them, and equally mocks the free lives of the Bohemian artists with whom Oswald has been living, without apparently having been to Paris. Oswald angrily defends the open relationships of his Parisian friends suggesting that they live more loving relationships with their unmarried women and bastard children than almost anyone he knows in the provincial Norwegian world from which he has come. And his mother argues that his views are no different from her own, an even more amazing revelation for the pastor who is about to spend a day and long night being shocked by the truths that are paraded before him.

       No sooner has he finished his flustered conversation with Oswald than he brings up Helene Alving’s own past, which began soon after her marriage to the so-called “Captain” when she attempted to leave him, visiting her then youthful friend Manders, a young seminary student at the time whom she believed she loved him, to confess how her arranged marriage to Alving was simply untenable given his notorious drunkenness and womanizing.

       Manders is proud to have refused temptation having sent her back to her husband, convinced now that she is about to dedicate a newly built orphanage on her own land in memory of her husband, that it’s all been for the best.

       But Ibsen takes the opportunity, the long day before that dedicational ceremony, to allow Helene to catch him up on the facts, since he has dared not visit her since her “disgraceful” attempt to escape the marriage. In fact, so Helene reveals, the marriage did not improve, but merely worsened, Alving’s drunkenness and personal abuse of her increasing. Even his affairs grew more licentious as he nightly bedded her own maid, Johanna, who bore his daughter, the current maid of Helene’s household, Regina Engstrand (Viva Hassis Gentes). That fact even further inculpates Manders who, through Jacob Engstrand’s (J. Stephen Brantley) lies—he who is currently the head carpenter of the orphanage—has confirmed by his own signature Regina into the church registry as Jacob’s legal daughter.

      Helene further reveals that it was not her husband who developed their land, making them rich, but she herself who usurped the duties he had abandoned, through intelligence and fortitude developing her farmstead into a source of income so that she can now spend precisely what was left of her husband’s estate on the false memorial of the orphanage, while leaving her own monies to her son at her death.

      In short order, in other words, Helene reveals the mendacity, hypocrisy, and utter stupidity of men like Manders of her community, who advises her not even to take out an insurance policy on the new building because people might gossip about his own lack of faith in God to protect it. How Helene ever imagined that she once loved Manders, who even she describes as a “baby,” is one of the many mysteries of this play.

      Once Ibsen has established his feminist heroine, one might have thought he could rest in his dramatic revelation of the mean and narrow-thinking patriarchal societies of provincial Norway. But the playwright does not at all rest on his abilities to demonstrate the rotten foundations of the lives of wives and children such as Helene and Oswald, but turns the table, so to speak, to show us even more startlingly how a strong-willed woman like Helene and even a free-thinker like Oswald are both facilitators and victims of such closed-off worlds.

       Indeed, it is Ibsen’s remarkable analyses of how hurt and revengeful women such as Helene help create the worlds in which men like her husband attempt to escape, and how both of them working together help to pass on their own dreadful failures to their children that transform this play into statement of global indignation. In this case, as nearly anyone who has even heard of this play knows, passing on deadly syphilis to Oswald, forced his visit not because he necessarily wanted to return to the barren and utterly boring wilds of small town in Norway but because of what the doctor has described as “the softening of his brain.”

      Ghosts are truly everywhere in Helene Alving’s house, the ghosts of her own loves and those she has not permitted. But even that word “ghosts,” which Ibsen himself found as an unsuitable translation of “gengangere” which, as Eyre points out, literally means “a thing that walks again,” is far too romantic to convey the horror that both wife and son discover within themselves. Perhaps we should use the word “zombie,” that suddenly popular demon of our own time, to describe the specters of this work which are not afraid to devour the bodies of their own flesh and kind.

       Even Oswald must eventually admit that he is repeating his father’s life with his temporary escape in alcohol and races around the table with Regina, although at least he recognizes that only she might be strong enough to finally, when things get really bad, to jab the syringe of morphine into his veins (in this play version, alas, the morphine comes in pills, which in fact is easier to swallow by oneself than by the force of another as we witness in the last scene). What Frau Alving and even Ibsen won’t admit is that her son’s syphilis could not be inherited from Oswald’s father except through a sore in her vaginal channel upon his conception—unless it was immaculate.

        If nothing else, the horror tale that Ibsen tells is not in the least possible of being described as that most despised condition that both Oswald and his mother can imagine: boredom. If anyone who carefully watches the spiraling revelations of this work were to describe it to me as boring, I’d sentence them to engage with the endless jabber of fabrications of QAnon for the rest of eternity. For Ibsen’s play, as he and others now for almost a century have come to recognize, is sadly based solely on the dreadful truths of our often shabby lies and lives.

      The trio of actors, Gray, Sherman, and Barlas, do a credible job of re-creating Ibsen’s house of horrors despite the fact that, at times, Richard Eyre’s somewhat rambunctious updating of the former staid British translations and his own devouring of a great deal of the poetry of the original. 

     For the most part scenic designer Frederica Nascimento did a decent job of condensing three separate rooms, living room, dining room, and bedroom onto one stage. But I cannot imagine what a series of boxes full of a jumble of objects spread out upon apron of the set might signify. I suspect it is meant to represent Captain Alving’s old mementos packed up and perhaps ready to be sent off to the orphanage when it opens. Clearly, it is meant to represent further aspects of the ghostly presences that surround Helene and her son. But it still creates almost a confusing blockade between the actors and the audience, the closeness of which is one of the delights of the Odyssey stages.

      And finally, do we really need an upside down hanging symbol of the orphanage building ready to come crashing down when it all catches on fire and is ready to be destroyed—without insurance of course? To me it merely served as yet another scenic intrusion to an already very busy set and series of actions as they fight the fire return and leave the house.

      But these are minor cavils in what otherwise was a most commendable production of play that seems suddenly very necessary, as DeLorenzo hints, for our own time.

 

Los Angeles, September 19, 2022

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (September 2022).

Richard Wagner | Das Rheingold || Die Walküre || Siegfried || Götterdämmerung / 2010

consummation

by Douglas Messerli

 

Richard Wagner Das Rheingold / LAOpera, performed at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles (the production we saw was on June 18, 2010)

 

Richard Wagner Die Walküre / LAOpera, performed at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles (the production we saw was on June 20, 2010)

 

Richard Wagner Siegfried / LAOpera, performed at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles (the production we saw was on June 23, 2010)

 

Richard Wagner Götterdämmerung / LAOpera, performed at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles (the production we saw was on June 26, 2010)

 

Over several afternoons and nights from June 18th to June 26, 2010, Howard and I attended the entire 16 hours of Der Ring des Nibelungen at the Los Angeles Opera.

    Much has been written about Wagner's overwhelmingly brilliant, often mocked, and sometimes hated achievement, and I do not care here to wade into the complex stories, myths, and psychological sloughs surrounding the work. The Ring, no matter what is thrown at it, is quite simply a marvelous human accomplishment, never quite matched in the all the years since its creation. Its mess of a plot, sometimes ridiculous characters, and forests of inexplicable riddles does not, somehow, diminish this work, and I think anyone—saintly or evil—who loves theater, music, and spectacle cannot help but admit to admiring it.

     What I would like briefly to focus on, instead, involves another kind of quagmire of sorts regarding the extravagant costumes and sets by the notable designer-directors, Archim and Amanda Freyer and the musical direction by the much beloved Los Angeles Opera conductor, James Conlon.

     Nothing I might write in connection with these issues is easy. For I highly admire the decision, which was strongly argued for, I have heard, by Conlon and General Director Plácido Domingo, to attempt this production. I also applaud their goal of bringing a completely new look and feeling to the great opera. That the company was almost destroyed in the process of bringing Wagner's four operas to the stage brings more blame, perhaps, on today's audiences and the high cost of such an undertaking than any misjudgment by the producers. It was and remains a noble act to present this work in a city always hungry for art, theater, and music, but not always appreciative of the particular manifestations of such.

     Yet all that said, there are some important questions to be brought up regarding this version.I swore to myself not use any variation of Dickens' tired antithesis to describe my feelings about the LA Opera's Ring, but it continues to summarize them: "It was the best of operas, it was the worst of operas."

      The first evening began swimmingly enough with the Rhine Maidens dressed in the billowing robes of water which is their home. The Freyers' highly raked stage worked nicely to create a sense of the swelling water, undulating in time to their joyful teasing of the ridiculous Alberich, dressed in this production, as a masked troll. The combination of the grotesque and whimsy in Alberich and the Niebelungs later nicely fit a world where they are entrapped in the process of refining gold.

     But already in the scene in Valhalla, we begin to become somewhat distracted by the costumes. Fricka's constantly outreaching hands may indicate her major activity of pleading with her husband Wotan, but to keep her character locked away in this position seems to allow no subtlety. She is, after all, not always pleading, but righteously correct her assessment of Wotan's own laws. The powerful giant brothers, Fasolt and Fafner, seem inexplicably to be alternating between dwarves and the incredibly tall construction workers by which the work defines them.

     Wotan, his head locked in a square-boxed helmet with his facial image reflected upon it, stole much of sense of power by which he is defined. Of course, he is a conflicted image, a God who is tempted, again and again, away from obeying the laws he has himself established. And there is no question that Freyer's costume implies this tension between his mind and apparition. At certain times, particularly when he stood at the top of the stage, however, the audience could hardly hear Wotan's (Vitalij Kowaljow) declarations, let alone tremble at the vocal power of his angry proclamations. At other times, Fricka (Michelle DeYoung) seemed somewhat distraught in her permanently outstretched position. Only Alberich (Richard Paul Fink) and Mime (Graham Clark) seemed comfortable in their dress.

      By the time of Die Walküre—easily the most brilliant of the LA Opera productions—the problems of direction, costume, and set became more obvious. In some ways, Freyer's attempts to create his own series of private leitmotifs, helped the audience—particularly those who had never before encountered the complex series of characters Wagner presents—recognize and define them. But by so thoroughly defining them, he also took away most of their "humanity," stripping them of any empathy we might feel for their human-like achievements and failures and leaving them afloat in a mythological world that separated them from us. A student of Brecht, it is clear that that was, in part, what Freyer was seeking. But in a work such as The Ring, which has already built into it a sense of separation from our daily experiences, the actors and director must work even harder, in some ways, to make us feel that these figures resemble ourselves.

     James Conlon is a dedicated and highly committed director. And his lectures before each the four operas were filled with beautiful descriptions of how Wagner's music brought us into the action both emotionally and intellectually. In my encounters with this director, however, it appears that he prefers sublimity over the barbarous. He is not the kind of director, I feel, to do justice to Stravinsky or Berg. And here, although he described the dreadful power of certain of Wagner's refrains, we seldom heard them. The music (perhaps in part because of the near-burial of the orchestra beneath the stage) was often beautiful, but seldom intense, let alone earth-shattering.

      Linda Watson sang and performed marvelously as Brünnhilde, but the constant dressing and undressing of her, as Siegfried later rips her gown away patch by patch, was more a distraction that an amplification of any substantive meaning, visual or otherwise. By the time we had reached Siegfried we had lost touch with this world, strangely at the very moment when we encounter the most human character of the entire masterpiece. Like LA Times music critic Charles McNulty I suddenly felt I had entered a California amusement park instead of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Admittedly Siegfried is a kind of bumbling idiot, a true innocent whose only major attribute lies in his powerful muscles. But to portray him simply as a kind of blond-headed Michelin Man is to destroy any possibility of human redemption. And that is ironically, why Wagner vested so much power in this figure. In his innocence, he even seeks fear, without comprehending what might lie behind it. In the course of the work, Siegfried discovers love, treachery, hate, and even death. He is of a new race, and as such, to close him off as a laughable stereotype does a terrible injustice to the entire work.

      For all that, the costumes and sets, even the ridiculous tilt of the stage, did create some memorable moments: among them the nightmarish underground world of the Niebelungs and the great battles (achieved through dozens of colored light sticks) of Götterämmerung. Perhaps I had simply grown more used to Freyer's methods by the last long work, but it seemed to me that the positioned costumes into and out which Gunther and Gutrune stepped well-fitted the mold of these opportunists. The orchestra itself, moreover, seemed to come alive and, still without the shattering thrill of sound one hopes for in Siegfried's death—a death which, as our opera-loving friend Bob Orr, in his deep Alabama accent, described it, "signifies the end of the whole Teutonic universe"—performed ably and even memorably. The audience, many of whom had never before seen a Wagner opera, was clearly thrilled. Despite my stated doubts, I too applauded joyfully with tearful eyes.

     This is clearly a production that should be seen again.

 

Los Angeles, August 19, 2010

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (August 2010).