Trying to be more sophisticated this year, my friends and I have taken advantage of the Metropolitan Opera's terrific student program to see some universally lauded works like Carmen and Tosca. Feeling adventurous, I went to the Met's next door neighbor, New York City Opera this week. It turns out that seeing Carmen at the Met is about as sophisticated as seeing The Lion King on Broadway when compared to New York City Opera's productions. If opera can be described at avant-garde, such opera is most likely to be found at NYCO. Originally founded in 1948 as "the people's opera" with an aim of making opera more affordable to a wider audience, it seems to be a home for displaying a wide range of opera these days. Its current season features old classics by famous composers (Donizetti's Elixir of Love and Strauss's Intermezzo), unknown operas by beloved American composers (Bernstein's A Quiet Place and Schwartz's Seance on a Wet Afternoon), and unconventional operas that are more performance art than anything else. Monodramas, in the latter category, is what I saw this week.According to a recent Harper's article about the triumphs and tribulations of the NYCO, the organization has adamantly supported its unique mission in the face of economic decline. Even though it had to close for a year following Wall Street's collapse in 2008, the company chose to open its 2009-2010 season with the unknown Esther rather than a more conventional piece. Though that season also included Don Giovanni and Madama Butterfly, they were balanced by a baroque opera and a "rarely performed" French opera. The Harper's article also describes the effects of being cash-strapped on the company. People seem to be more careful with props and there is little full rehearsal time before opening. After all, orchestras are expensive. New York City Opera has also had to "sell out" to David Koch, the conservative billionaire after whom the theatre is now named.
Is the end result worth it? After sitting through two hours of something I barely understood, I'd still venture a "yes." Everyone has described Monodramas as vastly different from any conception of "opera' you've ever had before. Consisting of three different short pieces, Monodramas is more like a staged classical vocal Twentieth Century concert with occasional dance components than a traditional opera. The first piece, "La Machine de L'Etre" by John Zorn (2009), is the shortest, weirdest, and most recent. The stage opens onto what looks like many people dressed in hijabs. Two people dressed in suits go around an undress a few of the hijabs to reveal people in more modern clothing. One (Anu Komsi) begins to sing to a very contemporary, jarring score. Two wooden thought bubbles arise, which start to show projected images of random things from canons to people. Are these the woman's thoughts? Do they upset her? We don't know because the entire piece is wordless, only narrated by the woman's haunting scales.
The second piece, "Erwartung" by Arnold Schoenberg, is the most accessible and narrative. It's about a woman (Kara Shay Thompson) who goes searching for her lover only to find that he is either dead, or in her imagination. She narrates the whole time as she travels through woods. Rose petals float down for the entire 30 minutes, bathing the stage in a sea of red that starts to resemble blood. I enjoyed the use of the ensemble. They truly accompany the soloist by dancing without overshadowing her.
Finally, the last act, "Neither" by Morton Feldman, brought out the alleged theme of the entire production: the fuzzy boundary of self and unself (whatever that means). Feldman writes music for a Beckett monologue. The text speaks for itself: to and fro in shadow from inner to out shadow/from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither, etc. At first, this piece gives off the sense of being at a parody of a performance art piece in Brooklyn. The stage is covered in a shiny metallic material. Shiny boxes rotate down from the ceiling like fifty disco balls. The two suits from the beginning of the performance are walking around, as if they are indeed at a museum. A wooden figure in the center of the stage (Cyndia Seiden) comes to life to sing Beckett's words. Feldman's score puts the soloist in her upper range for the entire piece so even though the words are in English, they would have been impossible to understand without supertitles. But after a few minutes, I became entranced by the performance. No, I wasn't reaching into the dark recesses of my mind to contemplate self versus unself, but I was thinking that I liked this dramatization of the song. This work would probably never have been performed in concert. Though there are lyrics, so many wordless expanses would have left the soloist with nothing to do in a concert. Here, dancing nicely fills the space. As bodies move around the mirrored boxes on stage, a sense of disorientation is created, achieving the precise effect that Feldman wanted to have on mid-Twentieth Century audiences.