Parterre Box: Perspectives, reflections, obscurity, and illusion

Dan Johnson from Parterre Box reviewed our production of In A Grove at Prototype Festival:

Christopher Cerrone and Stephanie Fleischmann's opera at the Prototype Festival re-sets Rashomon in the Pacific Northwest and binds its characters into a hellish cycle of violence with a dark, hypnotic score.
“In the round” seems like the wrong way to say it. What is it called when you stage something on a long, narrow runway, with the two halves of the audience facing it (and each other) from either side? You know, like a fashion show. “In the oblong”?
Well anyway, I went to see the New York premiere of Christopher Cerrone’s opera In a Grove as part of the Prototype Festival on Thursday, and of course the first thing I noticed when the crowd filed into La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theater was that the director, Mary Birnbaum, had staged In a Grove in the oblong: the audience was bisected by a runway, and set designer Mimi Lien’s runway was, in turn, bisected by a two-story lucite window hanging framed from a track on the ceiling. So as the opera began, the characters on either end of the runway, and the listeners on either end of the action, were literally, physically divided by their opposing points of view. A hint of stage fog thickened the atmosphere, so that the beams of designer Yuki Nakase Link’s stark, powerful stage lights were visible in the air, and in their glare the singers cast ghostly half-reflections on the pane.
It was, in other words, a perfect staging for a Rashomon story: a drama of perspectives, reflections, obscurity, and illusion. Re-setting the action to the Pacific Northwest and sensitively reshaping the action, Stephanie Fleischmann’s libretto for In a Grove is an adaptation of the Ry?nosuke Akutagawa short story of the same name, in which the various parties to a case of robbery, sexual assault and murder each retell the facts of the case from their respective points of view—including, through a spiritual medium, that of the murdered man—and each time transform or even invert our understanding of what has taken place.
There’s a touch of ritual to all of three of Cerrone’s operas, but I was struck by the commonalities between the source for this piece and that of his breakout opera, Invisible Cities, based on the novel by Italo Calvino. Both texts are recursive rather than linear, Calvino’s novel consisting of a dialogue in which Marco Polo attempts over and over to describe Venice to Kublai Khan via a series of parables about fantastical cities. Yuval Sharon’s groundbreaking production set the court of the Khan in an active train station, with singers and audience wandering in and out of the concourse, connected to each other through wireless mics and headphones.
But while the cyclical storytelling of Invisible Cities unrolls time into space, here it binds the characters into a hellish cycle of violence. And while Cerrone’s musical textures for that piece were as lavish as the production, Birnbaum’s minimalist vision for In a Grove matches the asceticism of Cerrone’s dark, hypnotic score.
His admiration for the music of Morton Feldman is apparent in the more recent piece, the musical materials drawing from a small gamut of pitches to oscillate on minor ninths and major sevenths, to lean gently on these dissonances. But while his procedural rigor never quite gives way to melodic warmth or lyricism, Cerrone is demonstrably more interested in dramatic affect than Feldman ever was, drawing his pitch materials from diatonic scales rather than atonal pitch sets and punctuating the moments of physical, sexual and emotional violence with music of dark sonic intensity reminiscent of Cerrone’s teacher David Lang.
For this production, the outstanding Metropolis Ensemble was tucked away not in an orchestra pit but in a loft above the entrance to the hall. Subtle amplification of band and singers alike allowed the sound of the musicians to surround the audience, while live digital processing subtly transformed it, adding echoes, reverb, and distortion to suit the drama. (Music director Raquel Acevedo Klein, hidden along with the band, conducted the singers via a live video feed to monitors at each corner of the stage.) There was an almost cinematic quality to the dramatically pointed timbral effects of the orchestration, and each of them hit its mark.
The singers themselves did beautiful work with the often angular lines, singing with little to no vibrato as the score demanded—think British sacred performance practice. Listening to the studio recording as I write this, I’m struck by how much more I enjoyed tenor Paul Appleby’s warm, ringing performance as the murdered Settler and the dark, heavy menace of John Brancy’s baritone as the Outlaw.
Oh, and just in case the runway stage wasn’t evocative enough of an especially ambitious Fashion Week presentation: we got costume reveals! Oana Botez’s lightly abstracted 1920s costumes are modular, so that during a transition, instead of seeing the sets change, we saw Brancy change from the costume of the Woodcutter who finds the body in the opening scene into the costume of the Outlaw who murdered him simply by restyling his outfit, while Mikaela Bennett just as easily transformed from the Settler’s mother-in-law into his wife—and all onstage, in full view of the audience. Ingenious!
Both singers just as readily inhabited their dual roles, with Bennett giving an especially affecting dramatic and vocal portrayal of the young widow’s anguish and shame. Along with a light, pure, ethereal voice, however, countertenor Chuanyuan Liu also served the most spectacular lewk, appearing first as a Priest in a simple, stiff black cassock, but returning in an even stiffer and more minimal reflective vinyl silver cassock to play the Medium.
In the medium’s scene—the opera’s last—his melody begins in unison with, then hocketing with, then harmonizing with Appleby’s, and it is here that the piece fully reveals the ingenuity of Cerrone’s compositional strategy: as in a classic police procedural (which, I suppose, this is), each testimony we hear fits an additional piece of the puzzle into place. Now, at last, with all four voices of the cast bringing together their material from earlier in the piece, all of the pieces of the music and the drama fit together. Not perfectly—there are some gaps, some overlap—but just perfectly enough to be satisfying, and just imperfectly enough to be beautiful.
Throughout the piece, Birnbaum’s choreography of the action is highly stylized, and the story is told to us as much as shown. But the chillingly abstracted, patient, insistent music and stagecraft, rather than cooling down the brutal action, instead work subtly to infuse the drama with an aching, dreamy sadness borne of a deep compassion for the characters, and as the piece comes to its close, it is with a sense of dread that the grand cycle of violence has come full circle, and that in its end, its terrible beginning has returned.
Photo credit Maria Baranova
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