Observer: In A Grove at Prototype — Review

Annie Levin from Observer reviewed highlights from Prototype Festival, including our production of In A Grove:

A few days later, across town in the East Village’s La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, I saw In a Grove, Christopher Cerrone and Stephanie Fleischmann’s opera inspired by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s 1922 short story of the same name. The original story deals with the violent stabbing of Takehiro, a samurai, with the events leading up to and following his death shown from multiple perspectives in a series of testimonies. The opera Europeanizes the characters and changes their context and professions but hews close to the emotional dynamics of the original story.
Cerrone’s score is full of slow, pulsing phrases, rhythmic tugs in and out of recitative and spare and dramatic instrumentation. The minimalist use of vocal manipulation, subtly complex reverb, looping and the like creates a sound that mimics the atmospheric smoke effects on stage. Director Mary Birnbaum places the performers on an empty runway, like the footbridge on a Kabuki stage, with the audience in straight lines on either side. The stage is empty, aside from a glass screen in the center that moves on and off stage at important transitions. The staging feels purposefully two-dimensional, like a long painting on a screen, and amplifies the drama of the excellently staged violence.
The costumes are 19th Century and military in design and made of light cloth like parachute silk. These simple, beautiful designs play an outsized role in this minimalist staging, standing in for much that is not shown. Singers Mikaela Bennett, John Brancy, Chuanyuan Liu, and Paul Appleby carried the show with trembling passion and immaculate skill. Like oppositional winds lapping a still lake, they rocked us from one end of this extended murder ballad to the other. You could not have asked for better performers.
The heady, throbbing, percussive score, shocking and tragic story and ingenious staging left me feeling (in the best way possible) like I, too, had just discovered a murdered man on a walk through a burning forest. In a Grove is a triumph and among the finest works at this year’s festival.
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