| A Night at, Having No Idea I was Going to be at, the Opera
“Go to the opera … if you like the production, you feel improved, and if you dislike it,
you feel superior. Either way, you’ve won.”
– Virginia Heffernan, The New York Times
I. Ways in Which a $10 Opera Differs from the Kennedy Center
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Bus route 80 in Washington runs for no discernible reason from the gritty Brookland neighborhood in Northeast D.C. to the Kennedy Center temple off the national mall in Northwest. Route 80 ($1.35 per trip) serves primarily black riders, most of whom get dropped off at manual labor and secretarial jobs miles short of the Potomac waterfront. (You’ve a better chance of hitting 00 twice running in roulette than finding a white person who’s even driven through Brookland.) Yet every twelve minutes, as if anticipating a rush on $300 box seats, a two-thirds full number 80 chugs through the Brookland bus pavilion with an aspirational “Kennedy Center” on its e-marquee. Following Route 80 on a map, the connection between the two parts of town can be described only as tortuous.
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Still, the connection exists. Every so often, Brookland reverses the cultural poles of Route 80 by staging its own opera, undercutting the Kennedy Center by charging a lousy ten bucks. I dipped into one performance not long ago, right after I moved to Brookland. The audience and singers looked as if they’d been collected at random from stops from along Route 80, a blend of race and class rarely seen in this stratified city. Having my opera cherry popped in this milieu proved enlightening—though not for reasons I anticipated. To understand how low-budget opera can equal the Kennedy Center’s offerings, I had to negotiate a path as circuitous as Route 80.
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I’d seen the show advertised in a free alt-weekly whose back forty pages crawl with creepy erotica ads. The notices mentioned only the name, The Tender Land; time, 7:30; setting, the student center at Catholic University of America; and composer, Aaron Copland, whom I knew only from the populist xylophone ditties in “Pork: The Other White Meat” commercials. Nothing about the show being Opera. Even minutes before “curtain” (there wasn’t one), the evening’s playbill offered clinching non-opera clues. Printed on non-glossy paper the color of toasted marshmallows, the playbill listed The Tender Land as simply another course in a five-night smorgasbord of folk music leading up to the Copland entrée, including performances of standards like Oklahoma!, Stephen Foster, and “La Cucaracha.”
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Be warned: The Tender Land is Serious Opera, xylophone free.
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| The auditorium doors opened unto a modest orchestra—and a dozen embarrassingly empty rows in front of it, exactly the sort of outnumbered-by-the-performers confrontation that usually scares people off of listings in free newspapers. That void, that vacuum of seats, had powerful suction forces, though, and sucked one unknowing opera-goer almost to its center. I’d in fact sat down already when a litter of jugs and a hand-hewn wooden fence appeared in my peripheral vision off to the right. A stage. And with it, a thankfully crowded gallery. I hustled over, soon safely immersed in the herd.
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Closer inspection, however, proved “stage” a hasty epithet: It was more a podium, and a highly temporary one. The rest of the theater seemed off, too. Backstage was a series of black curtains that ample-hipped altos brushed like peristalsis waves while entering and exiting; and to someone with a trained ear, the exposed rafters were probably hell on the vocals. A nearby man, seated in a row that skirted concrete pillars like bad seats at the ballpark, summed up his complaints with, “I have never seen an all-purpose room so bad for all purposes.”
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And yet, nothing can dampen the frisson when a stagehand kills the lights without warning. When the audience hushes—and begins to grind and rustle in the dark.
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Nothing, except resurrecting the lights to find the conductor, alone, onstage, for a speech.
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He wore a black suit, with a black shirt to offset it, and had enough shaggy silver hair to get two good fistfuls of. He seemed a man used to hearing his own voice. “I would like to welcome you here tonight …” He clasped his hands, setting us up and knocking us down with a wink. “Here to Kansas, 1954.” We were there.
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He proceeded to not only spoil the plot, but also, with unintentional irony, to shoehorn everyone into his reading of the piece—that The Tender Land was a damning commentary on social thought control and people pushing their prejudices onto others. It was H.U.A.C. with tenors, he said, and there was no need for independent interpretation.
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The plot (let it be spoiled) revolved around a conflict between the Moss family—two girls, their mother, and a granddad in a Kansas townlet—and two drifters who arrive and court the granddaughters. The drifters ingratiate themselves by helping to harvest corn, but local scuttlebutt accuses them of cross-pollinating young ladies in a neighboring county. Eventually, the local sheriff proves the accusations groundless. Nevertheless, basso Grandpa sums up the county’s feelings: “They’re guilty all the same.”
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The conductor claimed that audiences in 1954, at The Tender Land’s debut, gasped at Grandpa’s line—implying by comparison that people today hardly bother to yawn at injustice. And in case it slipped the mind that Big Liberal Themes would be playing out on-podium, the conductor cast the drifters as jive-y black men and the Moss girls as extra-white white girls.
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Having made his points, the conductor invited us to stand, flip to the Negro spiritual “At the River” on page sixteen of the program, and sing along, as if doing so were as routine as singing the Star-Spangled Banner. (An opportunity $300+ never buys at the stuffy end of Route 80, I’ll warrant.)
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Three verses and a coda later, he returned to his wooden box. My last glimpse before the lights died for good was of a young, alone-looking woman in a sleeveless white sweater, far down the curve of my row. She was blonde, and shadows on her face suggested she had just the sort of eyes, sad and tired and off-brown, that always slay me. She was sitting in the orchestra seats I had vacated minutes before.
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The show opened with the female protagonists: the star soprano Laurie, a whittled Judy Garland; the alto Ma, a girl so young that that the black creases of age makeup did no good; and Beth, a supposed eleven-year-old on whom pigtails did no good, and who barely sang and who was the only non-audience member to speak during the show.
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The antihero drifters were Martin and Top. Martin played the larger dramatic role, but Top was absolutely the coolest motherfucker on stage. Despite standing five-seven and weighing about 120, he sang deep bass, and he strutted forwards leaning half-backwards, and he could curl his sneering lips like cruel dumbbells. He also belted, twice, the coolest line of the show.
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“Damn my belly for being hungry!”
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Regarding Martin, I felt bad for noticing—since I knew enough about opera to know that in opera, as with the Burning Bush, the voice is All, and physicality counts for nothing—but Martin weighed at least thrice his fellow empty-belly-cursing buddy. And Martin’s shoulder-length vine dreadlocks were easily the least authentic Depression Era detail onstage. Then again, his blimpish, camel-toed overalls were time-capsule genuine, as was the knotted, non-Euclidean wooden fence on which he pretended to lean. Despite his girth, Martin moved fluidly, and, unlike many famous tenors, bothered acting. He seemed one of those wide-smiling black men who pull off being The Big, Fun Guy Who Wears a Shirt at the Pool, But Also Gets Girls.
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The drama’s genuine antagonist was Grandpa Moss, who in that obvious small-town, Great Plains way—according to modern Easterners reprising a 1954 Easterner’s interpretation of a Depression Era Kansas he doubtlessly never came within 20,000 dust-choked leagues of—wore straw hats and no socks, chewed straw, and mistrusted all strangers.
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Hailing from the Great Plains myself, not too far from Kansas (it might as well be the same state, honestly), I bristled at the way things were unfolding. But in other, more important ways, I admit not upholding my prairie heritage all that well. Whereas my Midwestern grandmother used to listen to the New York Metropolitan Opera’s three-hour foreign-language radio broadcasts every Saturday afternoon, without blinking, for over four decades, I got restless in the first scene when I realized the melody wasn’t whistleable. I’m exactly the sort of person—white, with disposable income, anxious to be seen as cultured—who supported opera for centuries, but that night even English-language opera was a foreign artifact.
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And so I nodded off. Twice. Mentally, the Route-80 driver was pulling up to the Kennedy Center, and I couldn’t help but comparing its spotlit pillars to the flat, gritty boardroom I was stuck in. I’d lost my opera virginity in the backseat of a Pontiac Firebird, and as intermission approached, I made up my mind to ditch.
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All that was left to get through was the First Act finale. But slyly, in that sneaky operatic way, the onstage duet turned trio, which turned quartet. I sat up. Soon, all the principals were jack-hammering away at the melody onstage, weaving their voices in iterative, Goldberg-varying ways, sounds that sounded like Opera should sound—the harmonies of the Spheres. Then, without warning, the trump of the apocalypse sounded. Martin revved up—his tonsils flashed and glistened—and the low-ceiling auditorium absolutely exploded. Covering your ears did no good. That high-C was the aural equivalent of spending a month locked in “the hole,” then getting a spotlight in the face.
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Before the shock wave quite passed, darkness fell. No one has ever been violated like that at the Kennedy Center—and they’re the worse for it. No matter how hard we clapped when the lights sprang on, we couldn’t match that volume. I was staying after all.
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II. Ways in which a $10 Opera Surpasses the Kennedy Center
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At halftime, I switched seats to be near the orchestra again, back near the sad-eyed blonde girl in the sleeveless sweater. I ended up behind a red-haired woman who had been so excitable before the show she’d applauded the warm-ups.
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The second act started with the hoedown all of us should have seen coming the moment we laid eyes on those temptingly puffable jugs onstage. But it was a charmingly illogical square dance. During intermission, the population of Kansas had doubled, with a dozen extras in gingham and denim suddenly appearing. And in keeping with High Opera traditions in Europe—at one point the Emperor’s law had decreed that all operas must contain a balletic interlude—Copland made the women dance ballet. Every pivot and kick, even those that might reasonably have been accompanied with a slapped thigh, they executed with Japanese delicacy and pointed toes. They also had pulled their hair back in that severe, ratchets-not-curlers way that dancers bequeathed to synchronized swimmers. A look that, combined with their hypertrophied shoulders and malignantly eugenic good looks, made the prospect of them reproducing seem scary.
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But never mind. Any incongruities were forgiven as soon as my man Top took over for his second great riff of the show. As part of a not-quite-honorable plan to distract Grandpa Moss so that Martin could sneak away for kisses from granddaughter Laurie, Top marched to center stage, cocked his cloth flat-hat, and invented a tall tale to befuddle the old man. It began with Top eating dinner at a stranger’s hearth, where he’s given the honor of carving the ham. But the ham is fused together like the sand at Los Alamos, it’s that overcooked. Top puts his feet on the table for leverage and hacks at the fucker with “one old knife and one old fork,” but he literally cannot make a mark. Understandably pissed, Top pigskin punts the roast right out the door—a disgrace that rouses the stranger to grab his double-barreled.
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At this point (to mime a shotgun, apparently), one of the unnamed denim dancers tossed Top a spindly pitchfork. Top didn’t nestle it against his shoulder, or jab with it, or employ the prop in any way, really, beyond bouncing around on the balls of his feet with it—yet no one cared. He’d magnetized the audience. It made no difference he’d only a pitchfork to stare down the bastard whose wife couldn’t cook. We believed. Even when Grandpa began staggering around, drunkenly angry, interrupting and accusing Top of lying and making up this story as part of a plot to distract him (all admittedly true), the audience sided with Top.
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Copland might have ended right there, and we’d have left satisfied.
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Less interested in Grandpa’s rant onstage, I let my thoughts return again to the surroundings and set; and from there it was easy for my attention to wander a few feet farther, to the orchestra. Since this wasn’t a musical theater space, the Northeast D.C. Orchestra could not conceal itself in a professional-style “pit.” The fifteen-member ensemble hovered instead in a ring of nightlights to stage left, crowded among stands and chairs like hobbits in a warren. From this oblique angle, I could also see the actors waiting backstage—and breaking character while waiting, the ultimate faux pas in legitimate theater. Here, there were none of the pretensions of realism that dominate productions at places like the Kennedy Center. All the stagehands, extras, and musicians were visible. Detail by detail, all the wiring and brick was exposed for inspection.
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Since moving away from Brookland, I’ve mentally revisited my first opera many times. I never expected to. Washington is no more (or less) racially stratified than Chicago or New York, but it’s stratified pointedly and poignantly different. Few of the white people in Washington hail from Washington (bartenders rarely blink at even my South Dakota license), which fills the city with transient young people who rarely settle down roots there. The Founding Fathers set up Washington as “ten miles square,” but so few of us immigrants there ever leave a mile-wide quadrant of Northwest D.C. As a result so few of us—this why Washington differs—know anything about foreign parts of the city. Ask a New Yorker where a slummy neighborhood in the Bronx is, and they’ll at least have heard of it. Ask a Washingtonian about three-fourths of his city, and prepare for an embarrassed smile. Washington is hordes of the temporary, of transients.
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So what’s living in Northwest Washington like, compared to Northeast? Like living in a Kennedy Center production of an opera. In Northwest, there are stone facades and foyers and fountains, people sitting outside and walking purebred dogs like well-dressed extras. The legal, and civil, and governmental infrastructure is more or less invisible there, everything that makes the city run being groomed and managed by unseen stagehands. A soundtrack plays from unseen places—and there’s always the feeling that it’s temporary, that you and everyone around you will be leaving Washington soon. It’s grand, and illusory. In the Brookland Opera House, we saw how a real show got put together. No pretending the slick was really real. The opera was even stratified. I’d rolled my eyes at how the conductor had singled out the two black leads onstage—but, well, that’s not so far off of how things are off-stage in Washington. At least we could now see that divide, dramatically, beneath the floodlights. On the rare occasions I visit Northeast nowadays, I’m reminded that life isn’t as land-scaped as it seems in Northwest; for most people, it’s grittier, more like a low-budget opera. You see how a real city works there, and there are times it’s better to see the wires and guts of things.
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All that understanding came later, I have to admit. That night, simpler things snagged my eye, and eventually pulled me into the operatic stream. I noticed first a male flautist. As the only male clarinetist in grades four, five, six, seven, eight, and nine, I was always attuned to gender discrimination in woodwind sections—especially theories that boys playing girls’ instruments are “fags” and “pansies.” But Mr. Flautist was no pansy. And in fact his eerily melodic solos established the lonely tension Copland needed to convey Laurie’s requited but impossible love for the drifter Martin on the dawn after their only night together. (So there.)
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Equally rewarding was watching the cellist. During measures of rest, he leaned face-forward on his cello, probably leaving impressions on his jowls. He might have slept. This was a peak at the pitstains of slobby art. When he roused himself to play, a twinkle-toes miracle occurred. His fat hands leapt into a nimble pas de deux. His eyes sunk low and his lids half-closed as his fingers hurdled the struts, twisting and sliding into positions impossible to square with anything short of the Kama Sutra. All at a snap. It was exactly the immersion in art I’d hoped to find at my first opera.
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It was also a welcomed distraction. This intimate view of the orchestra came only because some fool switched seats at intermission, to visit a woman wearing sorrowful eyes and a sleeveless white sweater. He was right about the chances of her slaying him: Just before intermission ended, just after the lights flipped on and off, she had re-entered the auditorium entwined in the arms of the man who played the bassoon. She spent most of the second act gazing at that oxblood red, frankly phallic instrument. So when family hatred and fate tore Laurie and Martin away from each other onstage, I felt exactly the pang Copland hoped I would.
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About the only other thing I knew about opera was that in the opera capitals of Europe, like Milan and Berlin, legitimate Divas and Divos often make curtain calls between acts. Their characters might have been stabbed in Act III, but they’ve no compunctions about scooting out to snatch roses minutes later, only to go right back to being stabbed in Act IV. Theatrics like that upset Americans raised on Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, but audiences overseas have less piousness about the stage as Reality.
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Astute audiences tend to applaud mid-scene, too, after well-wrought arias. But being a non-astute audience, when mid-scene applause broke out in Brookland—there should have been an air-raid siren, it was that unexpected—the rest of us in the crowd had no idea if this was appropriate. Laurie had just wrapped up a pretty strain when the puffy, red-haired woman in front of me began the most non-sarcastic solo clapping I’d ever heard. Whapitywhapitywhapity. She let off measure after measure after measure of firecrackers, continuing long after the orchestra had picked up the next movement. No volume of silence from everyone else was man enough to embarrass her.
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Her husband, a very competent ophthalmologist or tax lawyer by the looks of him, didn’t budge. He’d apparently developed the deep meditative skill necessary to tolerate the sound of one woman clapping. And no one, him least, was confident enough to shush her: For her exuberance might have been warranted. Maybe that aria had been brilliant, and, gulp, we couldn’t tell. We felt as inadequate as mortified.
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Of course, it’s also possible I’d just happened to park myself behind the parents of major soprano talent Laurie. (Another glimpse beyond the façade: Laurie has real parents!) This theory was reinforced as the opera winded down. Martin and Top had scrammed, leaving Laurie spurned and Grandpa huffy. But even before the last few crucial measures began, Laurie’s mother began bellowing, Bravo!, Bravo!, Bravo! And even before the conductor snapped his wrists for the final beat, she’d dropped her purse and scrambled to her feet, as had a probably unrelated gentleman in a suit across the aisle. Laurie’s dad remained seated.
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Only to stand a minute later, as the inexorable tide of a standing ovation drug him in. A few others stayed on their butts longer—but pretty soon the act of remaining seated threatened to become a comment itself. Those increasingly few of us still sitting didn’t begrudge Laurie and Martin and Top any admiration, nor did we want to scrooge the orchestra. But we felt displaced sitting or standing: The mixed Brookland audience looked around with the same question: Had what we seen been that good?
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I don’t know, but pretty soon there I was, clapping bipedally. At the Kennedy Center, no matter if you like opera, you’re assured of seeing a proper production at least. But maybe there’s no benefit in that, nothing lasting to take away. I certainly wouldn’t have returned to the night over and over in my mind every time I found myself in an unfamiliar corridor of Washington. Like ninety-nine percent of the people in the Brookland Opera House night, if they were honest with themselves, I’d no idea if I’d just seen a piece of crap performance. But unlike places with the weight of legends sagging the pillars, we could at least hope we’d just seen the greatest Opera this worst all-purpose room would ever know. |
©SamKean
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