Oscar Wilde | The Importance of Being Ernest / 2011

nothing but the truth

by Douglas Messerli

 

Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest / New York, American Airlines Theatre / the production I saw was on May 7, 2011

 

The central pun of Oscar Wilde's perennial comic delight—the homophonic relationship of the name Ernest and the word that characterizes "an intense and serious state of mind"—is at the heart of Wilde's work, for while the lovely women of this play, Gwendolen Fairfax (Jessie Austrian) and Cecily Cardew (Charlotte Parry), both can love only an "Ernest," a man of a serious state of mind, the young men, Algernon Moncrieff (Santino Fontana) and John Worthing (David Furr) immediately prove themselves be utter fakers and liars, both—as Algy defines it—Bunburyists, men who lie to their families about having a relative or friend elsewhere so that they can escape into the city (in Worthing's case) or into the country (in Algy's situation). And the first scene of this play is nothing if not complete evidence of these effete young mens' triviality, each competing with one another with absurd aphorisms and often meaningless bon mots. Jack, we may argue is the more serious of the two, but he is no more reliable in speaking the truth than is his friend Algernon, who besides being unscrupulous is represented as a kind of greedy glutton, particularly when it comes to cucumber sandwiches.

     We find it somewhat hard to believe, accordingly, that Jack/Ernest is so smitten by love of Algy's cousin Gwendolen that is ready to marry her on the spot, that is, until we discover that Gwendolen is just as frivolous, ready to marry him on that same spot because his name, she believes, is Ernest.

     All of this is great fun, but would become tiresome were it not for the existence of Gwendolen's Gorgon-like mother, Lady Bracknell (magnificently performed by Brian Bedford), of whom Worthing notes:

 

                                   I don’t really know what a Gorgon is like, but I am

                                   quite sure that Lady Bracknell is one. In any case,

                                   she is a monster, without being a myth, which is

                                   rather unfair…

    A great believer in "natural ignorance," Lady Bracknell is a stolid column of English conventionality, ready to accept Worthing because of his lack of political beliefs, habit of smoking, and apparent wealth, but unable to even fathom a man who has "lost both of his parents"—"To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness."—and is absolutely flabbergasted when she is told that he was found in a black leather handbag in Victoria Station!

      Bedford plays this most luscious of monsters absolutely straight, no winks to the audience, no loopy drag-queen flopping of hands, and no change of pitch in voice. Lady Bracknell, in Bedford's shoes, is, if anything, more of a lady than ever, muttering her ridiculous pronunciamientos in a post-menopausal voice that seems made for the role. To watch him at work, although his "acting" is so flawless that one cannot comprehend it as "work," is a true joy, something that for me will be hard to forget, and hopefully something I can remember for the rest of my life.

 

     The remainder of the play, as everyone knows, revolves around a series of hilarious coincidences and more outrageous one-liners than even Henny Youngman might crack in a single night. Wilde's play literally drips with wit.

     As outrageous as it first sounds, Algy's suggestion that women only come to call one another sister "after they have called each other a lot of other things," comes true when, Gwendolen, curious about Jack's/Ernest's house in the country, comes visiting only to find another woman hosting tea. Their bitchy politeness crackles with fiery hate.

     Even Lady Bracknell's pronouncement of Jack's "carelessness" with regard to the loss of his parents is apparently close to the truth, when we discover that Miss Prism (Jayne Houdyshell)—currently Cecily's tutor—once worked for Lady Bracknell's sister whose child she carried away forever in a perambulator one morning, and, confusing it with her romantic manuscript, placed the romance in the perambulator and the child in her large black leather handbag—the act releasing a series of prismatic images of what this class-structured society has wrought.

     The revelation suddenly makes the two men, Algernon and Jack, brothers—which they have spiritually been all along. Jack, who soon after discovers that his birth name was Ernest, can now marry his cousin Gwendolen, as Algy, although he must forfeit the baptismal name of Ernest, will now be permitted to marry the young Cecily. Thus, all the characters can be said to have been incorporated into one large family, where everyone will live happily ever after...if they can remain earnest!

     It is doubtful, however, that in such a world of winding tales and deceit, as this family has suffered, that deep seriousness will be long permitted. As Ernest (formally Jack) admits: "It is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth."

 

May 9, 2011, Newark, New Jersey and Los Angeles

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (May 2011).

 

Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II / Oklahoma! / 1998 [TV version, shown on US PBS in 2003]

allegiances

by Douglas Messerli

 

Chris Hunt (film director), Trevor Nunn (stage director), Oscar Hammerstein II (book and lyrics, based on the play by Lynn Riggs), Richard Rodgers (music) Oklahoma!  [Royal National Theatre, London / 1998, a televised version with a slightly different cast presented on US PBS stations in 2003]

 

In the few weeks since I wrote about the film Oklahoma! I watched a version of the British 1998 revival on television. That production, a generally fine one—with particularly good performances by Hugh Jackman and Josefina Gabrielle, but with weaker secondary character actors than the movie and what I felt was uninspired choreography by Susan Stroman (the good territory folks were even more gestural and less exuberant in her version)—basically supported my feelings about the dark elements of this fable.

     Even though the Trevor Nunn production attempted to portray Jud in a more balanced manner, and actor Shuler Hensley succeeded (compared to the film portrayal by Rod Steiger) in making Jud more likeable, the dangerous aspects of the culture he represents remained embedded in his behavior. Indeed, in this production it became even more apparent that Laurey had chosen to go with him to the social because he was a farmer, and, accordingly, someone more familiar than the self-assured cowboy Curley. 

     What the film had not revealed to me quite as clearly as the play was that, upon asking Laurey to marry him, Curley “converts,” so to speak, promising to become a farmer. The two warring factions—farmer and cowman—demand alliances, it appears, almost like the family kinships of Romeo and Juliet. And the musical even more pointedly reveals that Aunt Eller and friends are ready to break the law—or at least, as she puts it, “bends it a little”—in order to speed love on its course.

 

Los Angeles, November 2003

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (November 2003).

Martha Graham and Aaron Copland | Appalachian Spring / 1944, film version 1958

love, guilt, and consolation

by Douglas Messerli

 

Martha Graham (choreographer), Aaron Copland (composer), Isamu Noguchi (set design) Appalachian Spring / premiered October 30, 1944 at the Library of Congress Coolidge Auditorium / the version I saw was the 1958 film version, directed and filmed by Peter Glushanok.

 

I have seen the film version of Martha Graham's and Aaron Copland's great collaboration several times, and in 2002 I watched it again, this time taking notes on the associations and feelings the music and dance brought to mind. The reader should understand my comments not as a literal description of the dance's events, but as my immediate interpretations of what I thought I saw. Another viewing might produce yet other such emotions.

      In a sense, the work, which so brilliantly expresses the heartland and seemingly captures the sense of Appalachia, was itself a kind of accident. Commissioned by Graham and the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation to write a work for dance for Graham's company, Copland drew on Shaker songs and the kind of American idiom that he had already expressed so brilliantly in his ballet "Rodeo" of 1942.

     Yet Copland had no idea what to title his piece, and even upon its delivery to Graham it was still titled, according the composer, "Ballet for Martha." It was only as the piece was readied to be performed that Graham christened it, after a few lines in The Bridge by Hart Crane in which Crane describes the "spring" as referring to water instead of a season. Yet, Copland reportedly laughed, everyone applauds me for so aptly expressing the sensibility of Spring in Appalachia.

    Moreover, the original outline of script, described as a kind of gender conflict between men's and women's work, featured not only a Pioneer mother, but an Indian Girl, a Fugitive, and a Citizen. In the end the story was winnowed down to the simple outline published in the preface to the Boosey & Hawkes score:

 

                    A pioneer celebration in spring around a newly-built farmhouse

                    in the Pennsylvania hills in the early part of the last century. The

                    bride-to-be and the young farmer-husband enact the emotions, joyful

                    and apprehensive, their new domestic partnership invites. An older

                    neighbor suggests sorrow and then the rocky confidence of experience.

                    A revivalist and his followers remind the new householders of the

                    strange and terrible aspects of human fate. At the end the couple are

                    left quiet and strong in their new house.

 

It seemed to me that instead of the more European concept of "Love, Death, and Transfiguration," the tenor of Graham and Copland's more innocent and emphatically American fable is "Love, Guilt, and Consolation."

Here are my notes:

Into the yard of a newly built home, wonderfully represented by Isamu Noguchi's open walls with a porch-like structure on which sits a kind of rocking chair shaped like a butter churn, come the figures of the dance, first The Preacher (played in the original by Merce Cunningham and in the film version I saw by Bertram Ross), then the Pioneer Woman (Matt Tumey in the film version), and the Wife (Martha Graham in both the original and, at the age of 62, in the film). Four women (Worshippers) follow, who clap and dance joyfully, frolic, and, at moments, gesture prayer.

     A flute, oboe, and clarinet dominate this early passage, and when the flute reaches its highest note, The Husband (Graham's favorite, Erik Hawkins in the original and Stuart Hodes in the film version) enters, lovingly stroking the side of his new house, as he moves forward in pony-like and proud struts and leaps.

     The couple walk to each and move backwards, seemingly to reveal the history of their love, which is, through their various posturings, made somewhat ambiguous at times, with moments of fear revealed among their steady pleasure in one another.

  Now The Preacher kicks up a kind of ruckus, with the Worshippers following behind him as acolytes reveling in what one might describes as is a kind of spiritual square dance, in which he also leaps, bends, grovels, stands, and lifts.

     The Pioneer Woman comes forward expressing her own sorrows and delights, while the Husband quietly ponders his new life. The Wife turns to win the attention of her Husband, simultaneously demonstrating her own new fears and worries, and yet flirting joyfully with a kind of awkward hesitation.

     At one point she takes up the baby of the Pioneer Woman, kneeling, entreating her husband. Is it a desire for a family or her fear for the responsibilities it will mean, the commitments and sacrifice? Clearly, it is both.

     Although the storyline does not describe it as such, there seems to be also a tension between the two women, almost as if the Husband has previously known the Pioneer Woman and they been somehow involved.

      But now the Preacher comes forward into the center, as the couple join him, turning to stare in opposite directions before they enter the church for the plain but joyous ceremony, which ends in the couple stretching, spinning in joy, leaping in the wonderment of it all. The shaker hymn, "'Tis a gift to be simple, 'tis a gift to be free," dominates the spirit of the occasion.

     Here the music changes, the Preacher suddenly becoming agitated, spinning forward almost in a kind of dervish, tearing at the air, renting his hair, damning, cursing, accusing, praying. What is their sin? What horror is he describing to them? Is it an actual or imagined transgression.

     The Pioneer Woman comes forward as if to plead for the Preacher to cease, the Husband standing up, turned away in refusal of the sermon. So the Preacher gradually shifts from his violent gesturing, moving forward in a lighter tone and tune.  The husband embraces the world, returning to his wife, while his wife dances a more agitated dance, focusing on her chair-rocker-milking stool as if she were reevaluating her situation. Again. the Husband returns to her, as they repeat some of their earlier dances of joy, reiterating and repeating their testaments of love while Copland's score returns to "'Tis a gift to be simple," ending in a long bassoon chord.

      The Wife turns from her former fears to a sense of relinquishment, resolution, consolation, as the couple kiss away their fears and embrace. The community moves off, the Preacher wishing them peace as he leaves. Husband and Wife now stand alone in their new domain.

 

Los Angeles, March 3, 2002

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (March 2002).

Aeschylus | Prometheus Bound / 2013

tower of circles

by Douglas Messerli

 

Aeschylus Prometheus Bound (translated into English by Joel Agee) / the production I saw was on the evening of September 3, 2013 at The Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman Theater of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Villa, directed by Travis Preston and performed with the help of the CalArts Center for New Performance

 

Generally attributed to Aeschylus, and the first of what was probably a trilogy (Promethus Bound, Prometheus Unbound, and Prometheus Firebearer) Prometheus Bound is one of the earliest of Western works for theater and has been highly influential in Western thought since its creation. Yet, it is also a play filled with difficulties, particularly for our own time. Like Wagner’s Norse and German-inspired mythologies, Prometheus Bound is filled with sometimes arcane information and the complexly interlinking relationships between Greek gods and the humans the gods have encountered. For the contemporary English-language playgoer, the play’s intensive reliance on a Greek female chorus who chant out their condemnations, sympathies, and prayers for the great Titan, can sound, at times, almost comical, their shrill, wailing chants spinning out into almost meaningless orisons. And what can a contemporary director do to stimulate an audience who for more than an hour are bombarded by the voice of one being, telling his story, sharing his suffering, and predicting his and other’s futures, while all the time chained at the edge of a desolate cliff? How even to explain Prometheus’ brief encounters with various messengers of Zeus—Hermes, Kratos, Okeanos, and Hephaistos—and the almost inexplicable, stumbling in of Io, who Zeus’ wife Hera has turned into a cow, tormenting her with a magic stinging insects—even though she may later father Prometheus’ eventual savior Heracles? Just as in long stretches of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, in Aeschylus’ work there is often not much going on in terms of action.

 

     And finally, the very fact that this work is only the first of three parts, makes for a sense of this first being a fragmentary episode. Although Prometheus foretells his and also our futures, we can never be certain that he really does have the ability to see what he claims to, and others throughout the work scold him for not simply suffering in quietude to ameliorate the wrath of Zeus.

     But it is just that Prometheus can and does speak, that he refuses silence and denies Zeus’ unfair punishment for helping mankind survive, in particular,  stealing for them the power of fire, that we do care for this Titan, that we comprehend him, as Ralph Waldo Emerson described Prometheus, as “the Jesus of the old mythology”—again reminding us of Wagner’s Brünnhilde, who also was punished for intruding herself upon mankind, and, like Prometheus, was punished to remain in isolation, in her case surrounded by a ring of fire, for a seeming eternity before she is freed. If, at the center of this sometimes static work, lay radical ideas about the fight against tyranny, positing in Prometheus a hero willing to help the human race and ultimately end the reign of the gods, how can a director steer a course to successfully get to that point?

      Fortunately, seasoned director Travis Preston has saved his hero from shouting out his lines from linear rock, raising him to a vertical circularity that equates him more with Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Simultaneously speaking from his towering heights, the Prometheus of this production remains a Titan, while also suggesting a Christ upon the cross. He is, in short, one of us, and something beyond us, willing to suffer the eagles’ daily clawing and swallowing of his liver, in order to deny Zeus any pleasure in his punishment. Within the very stage set (the construction by Efrem Delgadillo, Jr.) we see both a continuity of time, a circle within the larger circle, the smaller bringing our hero through his daily sufferings, and the larger, a circle of community, a symbol of Prometheus’ embracement of the human race.

     The chorus, appropriately, not only speaks to him, but crawls up to join him in their shared sufferings. If there is sometimes something almost comical about their efforts, so too are any mortals’ efforts to communicate with the gods.

      Of course, even this striking visualization of Prometheus’ position would mean nothing if Preston had not found an actor who might be able to live up to the position in which he has put him. Ron Cephas Jones not only has the taut, skin-and-bones body that encapsulates the Titan’s suffering, but his basso voice booms out his thespian skills quite brilliantly—in near perfect opposition for what I previously described as the chorus’ more soprano efforts. Bound for the entire play, unable to move by himself, he nonetheless seems almost in control of the busy choreography (by Mira Kingsley) of the chorus, sometimes wrestling with each, and other times circling in a round dance that might almost remind one of Stravinsky’s pagan ritual in Rite of Spring.

      And finally, the music (by Vinny Golia and Ellen Reid), heavy on percussion, creates through its jazz intonations a sense of tortured coolness that reiterates the extremes of Prometheus’ emotional outpourings.

      If at moments all these elements—direction, acting, choreography, and music—momentarily slide into a kind of repetitiveness or even stasis that might make us fear that the difficulties of this tragic work might have, after all, won out—overall there is enough excitement in this production that the plays’ revelations brilliantly dominate. And even though the work ends, predictably, in utter despair, we can believe that one day the eagle will be shot, the Titan rescued, mankind freed from the caprices of the gods: Prometheus not only unbound but redeemed.

 

Los Angeles, September 4, 2013

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (September 2013).

 

Eugene O'Neill | Long Day's Journey into Night / 2018

tortuous nights

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eugene O’Neill Long Day’s Journey into Night / Los Angeles, the Wallis Annenberg Center for Performing Arts / the performance Howard Fox and I saw was on the opening day, June 10, 2018

 

Yesterday afternoon I saw the much touted production by the Bristol Old Vic of Eugene O’Neill’s most important play, Long Day’s Journey into Night.

 

    While this was not my first time with this long-suffering play (a suffering both for its characters and, often, given the play’s length, for its audiences), I clearly had not seen as many performances as others, so one critic sitting behind me made clear to his theater guest—he’d seen, so he quite loudly claimed, at least six productions. I had watched the wonderful Sidney Lumet film, still my favorite of all of the play’s variations, two times, and planned to see it again a few days after this performance just as a reminder; and I’d read the play at least two times, once after having to miss—given a large East Coast snow storm—a production for which I had tickets, starring Vanessa Redgrave, Brian Dennehy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Robert Sean Leonard. Moreover, I had also seen a recent production of the play with Alfred Molina, Jane Kaczmarek, Stephen Louis Grush and Colin Woodell at Los Angeles’ Geffen Playhouse last year (see My Year 2017).

     So, when attending the stunningly star-laden production at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, with a cast of Jeremy Irons, Lesley Manville, Matthew Beard, and Rory Keenan, I did have a fairly good knowledge of the work, having almost memorized many of the play’s significant scenes.

      Yet, I felt freed from the burden, so it seemed, of many of the critics sitting near me, I could still see this marathon-endurance with somewhat fresh eyes. And my husband Howard had never before seen a live performance, although he too had read it and seen the film version. Accordingly, I was open to a new interpretation, which surely director Richard Eyre, presented to us.

     Whereas previous productions and my own readings seemed to suggest that the play began in a kind of haze of a family reunion—Edmond having returned home after his adventurous experiences as a sailor, and his mother also having returned home from her stay at a sanatorium to help cure her of a morphine addiction—in which things “appear,” a word that should appear in double quotes, to be somewhat normal. 

     Mary is, as her husband James Tyrone tells her time and again, “looking fatter”—although in the productions I’ve seen, as well as this one, she looks thinner than a reed—with Mary attending to her much beloved son, Edmund, equally thin, who, so they all proclaim, has a summer cold.

     Of course, we immediately recognize this perception as a true illusion, or more deeply, a delusion. Yet, with the fog having lifted, the sun shining temporarily upon their lives, there is almost a feeling of a somewhat pacific family life hovering over them all. After all, O’Neill makes it clear from the beginning that Tyrone does still love his wife, and Mary still adores him, as she does her youngest son, and that even the black-sheep of the family, the whoring often drunken Jaime loves his brother, even his skin-flint father, and their problematic mother. This first act, with its many domestic necessities, the worry of all for Mary’s mental state and the dreaded fear for Edmund’s health, is balanced by the comings and goings of their maid Cathleen (Jessica Regan in this production) and the always irritated and invisible cook, Brigette, who invisibly attempts to bring this family together for their meals.

      Eyre and his cast, evidently, have purposely thrown this first act version away, immediately creating a tension between all the actors that one can cut with a sharp knife. Things that might once have appeared to be tenuous now cut immediately to the bone. The deluded expressions of family reconciliation immediately turn, in this performance, into ironic asides, expressions of true disappointment, dismissals, and evident hatred. The Tyrones of this cast almost immediately show their fangs while denying their every next sentence. One might be tempted to suggest that this Long Day’s Journey is a Trumpian world, where all the niceties have turned into bitter spittle.

    If there’s something almost refreshing in this sharply driven and quick-witted interpretation of O’Neill’s world, we also miss some of the lost belle epoch regalness and rituals that have, after all, allowed Tyrone to rule this ruined household and helped his wife into a drug addiction from which she will never ascend. This is not the world of Oxycontin addiction, but one of hotel doctors, and well-meaning townspeople who wash their hands from any dirty deeds.

     Fortunately, Irons plays Tyrone very differently from the imposing patriarch as we have seen in Sir Ralph Richardson, for example. He is a man, bitter and mean as he is, who is closer to Irons’ character of Claus von Bülow in Reversal of Fortune, a distanced and highly distressed man who sees himself as an innocent in a world in which his wife has faded into non-existence, or as the character describes it, “when she gets that poison in her system there’s nothing you can do.” Like our contemporary leader, he will never be able to comprehend that he is, in fact, part of that poison. In the last long scenes of this seemingly endless night, Tyrone even seems to be a wronged man, a child of a father who has abandoned his family forcing the young boy to work endlessly as an American-Irish child-labor world to make a dollar each week to help support his mother. O’Neill even allows this character to demonstrate that he has been a victim of his own success: having purchased, on the cheap, a play which made him a matinee hero but closed him out of any of his great Shakespearian aspirations. Even though he claims, however, that the great actor Booth highly praised his acting, we can never know for sure whether or not his desires were so very different from those of Mary to become a concert pianist. There is no evidence for either of their claims. Perhaps Tyrone was simply destined to become a romantic matinee “ham,” just as the deluded Mary was to retreat to her own bedroom to find a way out of her own “romance.”

      If Irons creates a new vision of Tyrone, so too does Lesley Manville give us a new portrait of Mary. This is not at all the fragile Mary of any other version I’ve seen or imagined. She can endlessly ask, as she does, “is my hair falling down,” but—particularly given the helmet of a wig she wears throughout the play—we know she is sharp as steel. Although she may continually declare that she is lonely, that she wants people about her at all times, we also know that she desires, even longs, to be alone.

     No longer is Mary a kind a butterfly whose wings have been torn through the long years of hotel living and her so-called mediocre summer house, but that she is a powerful wasp, ready to sting all those surrounding. Almost like the quietly imposing sister of Daniel Day-Lewis in Phantom Thread, this Mary is angry about everything, even the son whose birth caused her pains that led to her addiction. She does not truly want her family’s company, and escapes, in her imagination, quite willingly into a past of mid-west family life and a beautiful wedding gown that never quite existed—even though she does finally discover the gown in the memory-ridden attic of the house she can never describe as a true “home.” The gown she produces, alas, is not so particularly beautiful. Indeed, Manville’s Mary can never find a home except for the mythical one in her own imagination. She never has had a true friend—actors were not to be permitted into her bourgeois/religious sensibility—and she has never truly embraced the family whom she declares she loves. Mary is the very center of this Long Day, and yet she is someone who none of the other family members ever want to see again; if only she would fall asleep, allowing them to tip-toe up to their rooms allowing them to fall into their own frightful dreams.

      Unlike the other Marys I have seen, Manville makes you truly want to recoil from her presence. She is more than a ghost, she is a kind of haunted horror figure of the past who can only destroy any forward movement of this family.

    But then, as O’Neill quite clearly reveals, this is an already doomed family. Even Edmund’s seemingly loving brother warns him about his own treachery. And the true center of this world, Edmond, O’Neill himself (played by Beard in a kind of accent that is at moments difficult to penetrate) knows that although he is the most loved member of this Greek-inspired destructive familial world, he is also the object of their mutual wrath. One by one, they pet him, kiss him, embrace him, and hover lovingly over his body, while still spitting out their tortuous truths, filling him up with liquor, and, in Jamie’s case, literally pulling him in and out of chairs, almost as if Edmund were a kind of doll which he might use in his own libidinous desires. There is violence and love in every one of his gestures.

      I’ve always thought of this play as a sad tragedy of family life. But this production provides a completely different dimension—not one I’m sure I entirely appreciate—which makes apparent just how sadomasochistic this family was. Their pushes and pulls, their psychological whips and chains are everywhere. And there is no respite for Edmond—or any of the others. Drugs, morphine, alcohol, and, finally, Morpheus himself, the god of sleep, are the only escapes from the tortures with which they afflict one another.

      If I have some reservations about this almost brutal production of O’Neill’s drama, I realize now, more than ever, just how close Long Day’s Journey into Night is to Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the “mother” and “father” of the later work afflicting some of the very same tortures upon a young professor and his wife. In neither of these plays do the characters, even though they have little left in their lives, “go gentle into that good night.”

 

Los Angeles, June 11, 2018

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (June 11, 2018).