A Night At The Opera

Yesterday, I attended my first opera live, John Adams' Dr. Atomic at the Met.  I went with a composer friend, he and I have similar taste and concerns in a lot of ways, and it seemed like a cool thing to check out.  I would say my reaction to it was decidedly mixed.  This blog post from Mark Adamo gets at some of the problematic choices made by Peter Sellars in constructing the opera's libretto. Let me just say to those of you who (like me) are opera neophytes, the blog post gets into some musical terminology and mentions some composers whose names you might not recognize. Don't worry about it; skim those parts and keep going. It's worth it. Because he gets to the heart of what doesn't work about the piece on a writing level.

What I would like to instead discuss here is the opera's direction, and how it doesn't work and how it doesn't do the text its working with any favors.

There's an early sign in Dr. Atomic that director Penny Woolcock's staging is going to be problematic, in fact, in comes right in the very first scene.  In that scene, J. Robert Oppenheimer is going about his business dealing with the various tsuris involved with running the Manhattan Project. Some of the scientists want Truman to see a petition asking him to never use the bomb, people are warning about what the atomic bomb is capable of.  There are battle plans to be drawn up, choices to be made.  No one quite knows what this bomb will do when it is dropped.  A massive (And I really do mean massive) chorus sings notes of capital-d Dread throughout.  That chorus is confined to three tiers of doorway-sized boxed with blackboard behind them.  It's a striking and beautiful image.  In the foreground, Oppenheimer and Edward Teller fret at two desks, as orderlies come and bring them papers.  Oppenheimer smokes a ubquitous cigarette.

So far so good, right? 

Okay, theatre folk, pop quiz time.  Let us say that you are directing a piece of music, perhaps a musical number or some other moment in a show that has music.  So for the first part of this piece of music, there is text and there is music simultaneously, let's say in our example there's singing.  Great, so you have singing and music.  But then something happens.  The singing stops. But the music keeps going, in fact it gets far more dramatic when the singers aren't singing. This goes on for about 30-60 seconds.

Okay, here's the question: What are you supposed to do here?  What is the text (in this case the music) telling you to do?

Any theatre artist worth their salt will tell you: You are supposed to do something on stage to fill this 30-60 second gap.  Some action must occur during it.

This is what happens in Dr. Atomic during those moments: Nothing of import.  The performers either hold unheard conversations with one another in character or futz with some prop in a minor stage business kind of way (i.e. reading a file or leafing through a newspaper).  The amount of stage time where people are basically standing around doing nothing strung together would be longer than many plays I've seen.

This "Realistic" take on the material renders it totally dramatically inert. It's DOA.  Moribund.  And it made me actually uneasy. Far more uneasy than the actual music and text of Dr. Atomic which are largely about near-DeLillo levels of nuclear-filled existential and moral dread.  It made me uneasy because every atom of my being was saying "Something should be happening here! Has something gone wrong? Did someone forget a line? Or a piece of blocking?"  It actually seemed like a mistake until I realized that no, this was a directorial decision. A very, very bad, very deadly, hobbling directorial choice.

Take any moment from Dr. Atomic and photograph it.  The picture would be beautiful.  But theatre (and opera is a form of theatre, even if it obeys its own rules and conventions) isn't just about little individual moments separated from each other like film stills or a flip book. It's about the transitions that take us from moment to moment, and how those moments are themselves transitions between other moments.  Everything is always transition in theatre, and everything is always landing into an individual moment at the same time. That's part of what makes it hard to direct, and part of what makes it thrilling when it works, that's what gives it dramatic life. In Dr. Atomic no moment is deeper than its surface. Set changes were just set changes.  Reading the paper was just reading the paper.  

Now how does this approach hobble this particular text in particular ways?  Because the Opera doesn't really have any narrative drive.  It moves chronologically and has a plot, but it doesn't really have a narrative drive.  Something needs to be offered us to replace that. Something needs to be given to it to further evoke the emotional and imagistic qualities of the piece.  A good directorial approach (say by Simon McBurney) would require that while also giving us the sense of character that this production does.  

A second directorial problem is that Woolcock makes no effort to shape what our eye takes in.  In the large crowd scenes etc. you never really know what you're supposed to be looking at, which moment taking place where is important.  Because on some level, none of it is. The performers- including the principals-  rarely invest their stage business with stakes (thus making it appear that they too know they are just filling stage time until they have to sing again). One particularly agonizing sequence involves the night they postpone the nuclear test.  As the music (which on an underscoring level is pretty awesome) goes on... and on... and on... with no singing, we see various ways the soldiers and scientists are killing time... dancing, plugging in a projector, making out.  But it just goes on and on and on and there so many individual pieces of business that you don't know what to pay attention to. Meanwhile, off in a corner, it seems like you should probably be paying attention to the main character. Except he's just standing there. In fact, there are several principal performers in that corner, and they're not doing anything. But because the Opera has no narrative drive, why do we care about the couple making out, the guys hooking up the projector, the slice of life? We'll never see or get to know these characters again, they just chorus, they're just window dressing in this scene why isn't anything important happening during several minutes of wordless music?

It was frustrating, to say the least.

Now while people are singing, the direction is a different animal.  Clearly, Penny Woolcock cares about character and interaction and these are handled (again, in a semi-naturalistic way) that works and is effective, if unsupported by erratic dramaturgical nature of the libretto... 

As for the music, the score is luscious and frequently beautiful. The arias are great. There's a certain sense of genericness to a lot of the vocal setting, however.  The relationship between music, melody and lyrics are frequently unclear. It is almost as if any words with that syllable pattern could be fit over that music in that way and it would've have been just as effective.  Again, in the arias, this changes, particularly in the Act 1 finale (Batter my heart) which (a) has rhyming verse as its text which is refreshing and (perhaps as a result) is (b) the most specifically set piece, with the most clear relationship between melody and text.  Also, Gerald Finley performs the shit out of it.   If the whole piece had been written and performed with that amount of specificity and drama, it would've been quite a show.

Comments

[Colin]

if you haven't already, check out some interesting points about the libretto, from an author/poet: http://www.slate.com/id/2202878/

And also Greg Sandow (a composer/music critic): http://www.artsjournal.com/sandow/2008/11/must_reading.html

It's pretty great that a lot of folks are seeing this opera (not just music or opera people), and expressing reservations about it.

[Ben TS]

Great post. I think the problem with opera directors is that in that world you're often dealing with multiple performers in the same role, co-stars who spend virtually no time together, and more than a few "stars" who are commpletely bereft of acting talent. So you end up with directors who throw up their hands and say, "Well, might as well come up with a kickass concept, make some nice tableau, and hope for the best."

[Scott Walters]

I had a class with a man named H. Wesley Balk, who was an opera and theatre director who wrote some outstanding books that I recommend highly. He talked about the three modes: hearing mode, seeing mode, and kinesthetic mode. Seeing mode is centered on the face, and involves emotion; hearing mode centers on the voice, and involves sound; kinesthetic mode is centered on the body, and involves movement. Most people have one of these dominant, and their choice of artistic genres reflects it: seeing mode prefer theatre; hearing mode, music; and kinesthetic mode, dance. The problem, according to Balk, is that opera combines hearing and seeing modes. Hearing mode audience members get angry when people are moving around when they're singing -- they want to focus on listening, and the movement distracts them; seeing mode audience members get frustrated when the singers stand and deliver, because they want something to happen emotionally. The opera director, who has his own dominant mode, ends up making a choice between the two. Clearly, this director, in the 30 - 60 seconds when music was playing but there was no singing, saw that time as a caesura, and the audience should be focusing on hearing the completion of that musical phrase. You, Isaac, as a theatre person, are impatient with what you perceive as the gap in the world of the play's drama. It isn't that you're wrong and the director is right, or vice versa, it is that your modes aren't matching up. What is ironic is that Peter Sellars is often hated by traditional opera buffs precisely because he brings his seeing-mode orientation that he got from theatre into the opera, driving the opera buffs crazy with seeing-mode distraction. All of which is to say: it's complicated...!

[DJA]

Speaking as a "hearing mode" person: the instant you put that shit on stage, it's drama. When you are on stage, the rules of the stage prevail. Or at least, they ought to. People who do not want stuff to happen on stage because it distracts them from the music should sit at home and listen to the cast album, or go to unstaged concert performances. But even the most hardcore, old-school fans of stand-and-deliver style opera demand the visual spectacle of sets, costumes, lighting design, etc. Why they do not also demand competent direction and purpose-driven performances from the cast is something I have never been able to wrap my head around.

[Scott Walters]

Well, that's not how true opera hearing mode people feel.

[DJA]

True opera "hearing mode" people don't demand opulent sets and lavish costumes? Scott, I am not sure which opera buffs you have been talking to, but I can assure you this is not generally the case.

[herxanthikles]

I haven't seen Dr. A yet (though I hope to catch the movie theater broadcast on Wednesdays) but I think the operative word that Isaac used vis a vis the hearing seeing distinctions is "futz." You can be a hearing or a seeing person, but if the singers are just "futzing" on stage, it's irritating. Not much to watch, and distracting to the ear. Nobody wins. It happens a lot.

Ideally, any action onstage is generated somehow by the music, and the two should have a happy symbiotic relationship. Whether this means a lot of action or very little depends on the score, but a good opera director will bring the eye and ear into union. I like the distinction of hearing and seeing mode people, but not if a hearing mode person is someone who wants to be watching a concert and not if a seeing mode person refuses to listen for the drama as well.

[Ken]

I saw Dr. Atomic last week, and while I really enjoyed the music (my opinion of John Adams grows and grows with every piece of his I hear), but I had real problems with the libretto and direction. As for Sellars' "libretto," the found material stitched together tended to bore me (the great exception being the "Batter My Heart" aria using the poetry of Donne, which was beautiful, and as you say Isaac, Gerald Finley performs the SHIT out of it). Though it might have seemed novel to have the text be nothing but Oppenheimer's favorite poetry and various bits of official documents/correspondence, it ended up having the effect that much of documentary theater has (on me, at least): It may be "real," but it's not interesting. The letters, documents, and poetry that Sellars used should have been a jumping-off point for a libretto, background material for a more character-specific text (See Adams' great "Nixon in China" with a wonderful libretto by Alice Goodman). As is often the case, a leap of imagination would have gotten us closer to the truth than the "facts" do.

[Steve Smith]

Excellent analysis, and one with which I'm largely in agreement. As for those inert passages in the opera, the places where the music continues to build but the action goes completely dead... well, I don't remember every last detail of the original San Francisco production by Peter Sellars, and haven't yet attempted an A-B comparison with the DVD of that production made by the Netherlands Opera, but it's perhaps worth noting that one key element in the first production was altogether missing in the Woolcock staging: the choreography of Lucinda Childs. As I remember it, many of those seemingly empty musical passages were originally filled with busy, bustling motion. And it was exactly that sense of animation -- of the electricity of the event and of the moment -- that I found so sorely lacking in the Met's new version.