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[INDEX]
Comparisons are invidious. They are also instructive.
Take two new operas seen in New York this month - Deborah Drattell's Lilith
uptown at the New York City Opera and Rinde Eckert's And God Created
Great Whales downtown at The Culture Project. Both operas tackled
Biblical themes with larger sociocultural and psychological resonances.
Both operas developed a dialogue between two warring aspects of one character.
But there the similarities end.
Lilith debuted to yawns and snickers from a papered house, was
critically panned, closed after 3 shows and was immediately consigned
to the dumpster. And God Created Great Whales is an embryonic work
of genius that deserves to be immediately developed, expanded and produced
by the Lincoln Center Festival or - can we dream? - the New York City
Opera. The fact that crummy Lilith was produced in a glamour venue
while the brilliant Great Whales struggles in an Off Broadway theatre
raises disturbing questions about artistic priorities in America today.
There is no reason the biblical character of Lilith couldn't make a good
opera, in the tradition of naughty girls like Elektra, Sappho, and Salome.
But the City Opera production - despite John Conklin's beautiful staging
and Anne Bogart's exciting direction - was a piece of dogmatic feminist
rubbish wrapped in opaque verse garnished with sub-Menotti melodies and
clinking Middle Eastern sound effects. If you could stay awake, the Cabbalist-Talmudic-postmodern
revisionism seemed to be about “reclaiming” the unfairly demonized female
icon Lilith (Adam's first wife) as a “strong female character”, a founder
of the Mesopotamian Women's Lib movement, as it were. Lilith's alter ego
was the repressed and guilty Eve, performed with wild abandon by soprano
Lauren Flanagan. David Steven Cohen's fulsome libretto was unbearably
pretentious, and clashed with Drattell's feeble, padded, and inadequate
score. The New York City Opera squandered tens of thousands of dollars
on this schmeer. In that sense, if no other, Lilith was a tragedy.
 Downtown,
And God Created Great Whales proved that real art can thrive on
a shoestring. The 75-minute opera was commissioned in 1998, originally
workshopped at PS122 in January 2000, and premiered on June 1, 2000. It
has had several critically-acclaimed revivals since then. Now its back
at The Culture Project on Bleecker Street, a humble blackbox theatre decorated
with little more than a few bare light bulbs and a grand piano.
This is basically a one man show focused on the astonishingly talented
composer, actor, singer and musician Eckert (photo left) who plays Nathan,
a composer trying to complete an opera based on Herman Melville's novel
Moby Dick, despite suffering from degenerative memory loss. Tape
recorders have been prepared to remind him how to complete his opera.
They play messages like “If you are still listening to this, you have
forgotten to rewind. Your condition has worsened. Turn on the orange tape
recorder.” (Yes, its a lot like the recent movie Memento). Eckert
sings in a virile operatic baritone as he acts the parts of Ishmael, Queequeg,
Ahab, and the chorus of sailors. He plays a few chords and melodies on
the piano. Most of his score is prerecorded on synthesizers and played
on speakers. Few performers could juggle these elements. Eckert does it
all brilliantly.
Nathan's degeneration gives the show a sense of tragic poignancy and urgency,
as he hurriedly sketches the music and libretto in a race against time.
His creativity is punctuated by manic spells where he obsesses on the
nature of memory, thought, time, space, and reality. Normally we expect
these kinds of metaphysical tantrums to be ironic (Woody Allen) or pretentious
(French movies). But Eckert delivers fascinating and chilling science
fiction/philosophy monologues that send the mind reeling.
But mostly we just applaud Nathan/Eckert as he composes choruses, arias,
and mood music for Melville's famous scenes such as the New Bedford sermon,
Ishmael's meeting Queequeg in bed, the whaling ship's launch, the sailors'
dance, Ahab's monologue, and the whale hunt. Finally, Ahab throws his
spear, the ship goes down, and nothing is left but gulls circling over
the foaming ocean. You can almost hear the birds and smell the sea. The
opera is over and Nathan is now a vegetable, sitting in front of a TV.
In one way, this show is like a huge pitch for a commission from a major
opera house, and it deserves to be taken seriously. Eckert's outline for
an opera based on Moby Dick is utterly convincing and grippingly
interesting. I would even say it contains the seeds of the Great American
Opera. Certainly it is stronger and more original than recent major stage
commissions like Dead Man Walking (Heggie/San Francisco Opera),
Streetcar Named Desire (Previn/San Francisco Opera), Central
Park (New York City Opera), and Lilith.
It is reassuring that music and theater critics have universally praised
this work (New York Magazine called it “more profound in its complexity
of thought and more effective in its delivery of beautiful, emotion-packed
music than any other contemporary opera on the boards today.”) Let's
hope that uptown presenters take heed and give Eckert carte blanche to
realize his brilliant vision.
And God Created Great Whales continues at 45 Bleecker Theater,
45 Bleecker Street at Lafayette Street. New York, NY. (Tel. 212-307-4100;
212 253 9983). Closes Jan. 13, 2002.
> New York City Opera
> Culture Project at 45 Bleecker
> Rinde Eckert Home Page
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