A little kid again

The most recent production I was in was one of my most joyful artistic experiences in a long time.

It was a production of two not-very-well-known baroque operas, Campra’s Orfeo Nell’Inferi and Charpentier’s La descente d'Orphée aux enfers. (It probably doesn’t take too much French or Italian knowledge to recognize that both of these operas are tellings of the Orpheus myth). Now, personally, baroque opera has never particularly excited me. I find the da capo arias a little too formulaic, the musical storytelling a little too mannered, and the musical language itself a bit boring. I tend to like lusher colors and spicier harmonies—and music written for my voice (lyric baritone), which didn’t seem to really be recognized as a voice type until the late 18th century. Furthermore, my role in this show was to be relatively small. Not exactly a combination that led me to predict immense artistic satisfaction.

But it ended up being one of the best shows of my recent life. Why?

The credit goes to our brilliant director, James Darrah. What made James’ approach so fulfilling and joyful? I would sum it up in two words: openness and play.

James arrived to our first rehearsal with the following:
(1) a concept for presenting the two operas embedded in a larger narrative that would play out as a pre-show storytelling improv
(2) a deep study of the material
(3) a great deal of experience with Baroque opera and an expert knowledge of the style
(4) no specific pre-conceived blocking.

It’s the number 4 there, that he didn’t come in with a micromanaged, preplanned staging, which made the process so special. More on this later.

Historic Venue

We presented this performance at the Clark Library near downtown Los Angeles. The building was built in the 1920s as a sumptuous neo-classical/ neo-rococo Library to house the private collection of William Andrews Clark. It is now owned and administered by UCLA.

Because of this setting, James devised the idea that the cast would actually be the ghosts of the library’s 1920s/30s-era wealthy occupants. We would be inhabiting the grounds, and the audience would be witnessing our ghosts/memories/shades/whatever reliving the events of a particular day back in that era—a day which included all of us mounting an opera (y’know like rich people did for fun). (Pretty sure James subconsciously took inspiration for this conceit from one of my favorite old computer games, The 7th Guest.)

Openness & Organic Creativity

But James did not assign us our pre-show characters. Instead, we created them ourselves. James invited us to take the mythological characters we portray in the operas, and translate them into their 20th-century equivalents. But he didn’t do this literally, instead he asked to identify that character’s attributes, their values, and from that information we built, by analogy, characters who might’ve lived in the 30s.

For example, my character was Apollo, the father of the protagonist Orpheus. In the opera my only role is to appear and tell Orpheus not to kill himself, because

C’est répandre mon sang que de verser le tien
To let your blood is to spill my own. (Because I’m his Dad, get it?)

So my character’s main attributes are paternal and familial pride. Simple enough. But from this we arrived at the character of a patriarch, someone respectable…maybe a judge (we eventually decided, a Senator).

All the other singers did the same thing, creating their character for the wraparound story based on the traits and motivations of their opera character. Prior to our shared process of devising them, none of these characters existed in James’ mind, even though the concept for the wraparound show was his. Furthermore, none of these characters were designed or conceived to fit into a narrative architecture. Rather, they were created, as it were, independently, each from the inside out. Once they had all been constructed, we began conceiving their interrelationships and fitting them into a story.

The whole process felt free of preconceptions or limits—although James kept us from going too far along unproductive tangents and helped tie the whole thing together. It was a wonderfully free, fun, and joyful process. It was like being a little kid pretending again—although with fun adult themes like affairs, rumrunning, witchcraft, adultery, and so on.

As for the stagings of the operas themselves, these had a greater degree of authoritative guidance from James, but nevertheless sprang organically from the characters we had created for the preshow material.

In the first opera, an intermezzo by Campra, we created something of a farce—our 1930s characters bumblingly attempting to mount a low-budget production of “Papa’s favorite intermezzo.” For the second opera, a two-act French serious opera by Charpentier, our characters were no longer reliving a day from the 1930s but now dead & haunting the Clark Library grounds—the denizens of Pluto’s Underworld, who claim the modern-day 2020-era Eurydice and her boyfriend Orpheus.

Working on the Charpentier invited another level of creativity: the non-literal. Non-literal, non-narrative, and non-linear are descriptors of some of my own favorite art. And to play underworld characters—not historical Senators or the like, but dead shades, tortured spirits living in a timeless realm disconnected from mundane experience—was a legit creative thrill. It involved stripping away the usual actor’s goals of naturalism, the concern “how would my character feel about that?”, and so forth. We played spirits trudging through sap, moving in slow-motion, inhabiting a dreamlike world. Our staging involved unnatural movement, organic protoplasmic movement, mechanical movement—every kind of movement but natural human movement. We crawled over chairs, slithered along the ground, combined into writhing masses—all this in the relatively confined playing space of the center aisle of the Clark Library.

In retrospect I am struck by how, between the three products—one pre-show wraparound and two very different opera stagings—we covered such a huge range of creative processes and kinds of artistic work. For a creative person, in my opinion, this kind of process provides the ultimate privilege and joy, the ultimate fruition of what we as artists are in this pursuit to do. It was certainly a pinnacle among staged productions—opera or otherwise—that I’ve ever done.

Play

Although a lot of really smart people were in the room, with lots of research about mythology, about 1930s LA, and many combined college degrees’ worth of knowledge about classical music and Baroque style; and although at the head of this phalanx of smart people stood an even smarter and more well-read person, i.e. James Darrah; nevertheless the fundamental activity most of the time was that of creative free play. That, I was reminded, IS the fundamental creative activity—which is very easy to forget in a study-environment where every single day’s portion is a constant focus on technique, on correct execution, on analysis, on musical & stylistic accuracy.

Of course, the mastery of the technical elements is the prerequisite of the “play”. This is the strange paradox of making art. For a bunch of untrained people to come in off the street & produce these two operas—no matter how visionary the director’s style or how beautiful the process—would be an exercise in misery for cast and audience alike. But on a well-frozen and zamboni’d rink of technique and accurately-learned music, this cast was able to skate the sublime ice-dancing act of free associative play.

Interpretation and Comprehension

For the dreamlike Charpentier portion, as well as for the overall architecture of the piece, we ran the risk—nay, the certainty—that the audience would not fully comprehend it in terms of narrative. For one thing, the pre-show story was played out simultaneously across the Clark Library grounds, the characters weaving their separate storylines over about an hour of time outside the building in different areas, inside it in different rooms. In other words, it was totally impossible for any given audience member to see the complete action of the pre-show play. The subtext of the pre-show characters, then, in their interrelationships as they attempted to mount the Italian intermezzo, would again have required an immense amount of deduction and concentration, probably beyond the powers of the average audience member. And when we got to the Charpentier, where all our characters were substantially obliterated and the bonds of literal narrative substantially loosed, the attempt to understand in a linear way was rendered utterly hopeless.

Interestingly, guided as we were by the integrity of our from-the-inside-out construction of the piece, none of us were really concerned about this lack of understanding. And, as far as I could tell, none of the audience was much bothered by it either. I think, even for those who are not devotees of abstract & experimental stuff, there is an inherent satisfaction in being absorbed by an organic and (internally if not externally) cohesive story.

I’m reminded of a conversation with my friend Ian. Ian is a poet who writes beautiful, snarled, sometimes very opaque poetry. I was talking with him about some poem of his that I couldn’t grasp, one in which, as soon as I had a handle on its theme, the next line would obliterate what had come before, contradict it, point in a new direction. I couldn’t understand this style of multiplicity bordering on randomness.

He told me that a mantra of one of his teachers had been, “singularity is the true shipwreck.” Meaning, if a work says only one thing, is about only one thing, conveys one single thesis—it is a waste.

Why? At the risk of putting words in my friends mouth, I think he meant—and here we get a bit into the postmodern ethics of art—singularity is a shipwreck because all morals are lies, all statements are oversimplifications. Because, in short, categorical thought doesn’t actually make contact with reality. The only way to be honest is to point toward the disjunction and kaleidoscopic quality of lived experience. To make comprehensible, singular statements is like tying up, with brown paper and a neat little string, that which cannot properly be held in a parcel—i.e. Truth or Experience.

Obviously this conversation, held rather drunkenly over beers in a dive bar in Anchorage, Alaska, has stuck with me. I think about it often… “Singularity is the true shipwreck.”

Likewise, I’ve been watching a lot of interviews lately of David Lynch. Lynch, of course, is famous for works which are practically impossible to comprehend literally, and many an interviewer asks him to elucidate a given film only to be met with a straightforward “no,” or, “I don’t want to talk about that.” In a couple instances I have heard Lynch say that explaining the thing closes it off—that having an authoritative interpretation kills the magic of the interplay between audience & artwork. “Singularity is the true shipwreck.”

All this is a long way of saying that, far from being disquieted by it, I was most pleased to be involved in a production where its literal narrative sense was not easily grasped—one that avoided the shipwreck of singularity.