The Listeners
Marvelous music and weak storytelling in Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek's new opera
It's election day. I will not implore you to vote. For those of you stressing out, remember that feelings are temporary, and they will pass—and please put down your goddamn phone (after you finish reading this). For those of us on the left, we are in a lose-lose situation, which is beyond the scope of this newsletter. As ever, our greatest hopes lie in building power outside of the electoral realm, especially in the labor movement.
So I will implore you today not to cross the picket line drawn by striking New York Times tech workers, who walked out yesterday after three years without a contract. The NYT Tech Guild is asking us all to respect the digital “click-it” line by not playing NYT Games, nor using NYT Cooking app, until the strike is resolved. Solidarity is worth losing your streak for.
A note on The Fringies
The Fringies are supposedly an audience choice award, but I am here to cast doubt a little bit of doubt. Bluebeard: A Cabaret by Curlyfish Productions won the award for theater. Surprising, as it is not only not primarily theater—there is a separate cabaret category—but rather cabaret and storytelling according to both its listing and title, and because it had a two night stand in a small venue.
Anyone with the link can vote in the Fringies. You need not have seen the show, just have the link. Not a very good system, as the key component of an audience choice award is the audience. I’m also generally curious about the formula they use, as it’s not a straight vote, but rather a 1 to 5 star rating. These awards have real meaning and import to artists, and they deserve transparency.
FringeArts did not return a request for comment. Give us the numbers!
The Listeners
Opera Philadelphia co-commissioned with Norwegian National Opera and Lyric Opera of Chicago, co-presented with FringeArts
music by Missy Mazzoli, libretto by Royce Vavrek
directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz
Recommended, with qualifications: Come for the music, not the storytelling
I am not a classical music critic, and I have no pretensions to play at being one. This is fitting, as Opera Philadelphia’s new name-your-ticket initiative has sold hundreds of tickets to people who’ve never been to the opera before, just like me (at least, not the opera, as such). I am familiar with opera, however—and not just contemporary light hip-hopera like Hamilton—especially if you count the time I dropped out of History of Opera Pt 1 back in college, which was a class mostly full of opera students, and which I had made the mistake of taking when I was overloaded in the first semester of my senior year while working on my own project and also assistant directing an Ibsen play. I’m still disappointed that I didn’t take myself to see Akhnaten at the Metropolitan Opera.
So I was excited to see this new opera by MontCo native Missy Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek, who are working together on an adaptation of Lincoln in the Bardo for the Met. I’ll be focusing here, as befits this blog, on things other than Mozzoli’s music, which I found to be rather good and compelling for the most part but isn’t what I was actively thinking about through the show. Vavrek’s libretto, however, is uneven and poorly plotted. Major events that drive the plot seem to happen only because the plot requires them to, even though a mischievous coyote character (Sydney Donovan) who dances but does not sing, tries her best to help the plot along. I think it also has a poor grasp on a significant chunk of its subject matter.
The Listeners is about people in a California desert suburb who hear a “hum,” who are plagued by it, the noise like “an electric drill grinding into my brain” as the protagonist, Claire Devon (Nicole Heaston), a high school teacher, describes it. Or as her student, Kyle Harris (Aaron Crouch), describes it, in some of the most exciting language in the opera, “A hard buzz, / Like the engine of a truck / Rumbling its way to hell, / Colliding with the / wall of a cemetery.” This poetic language when discussing the hum, or in Claire’s introductory scene where she talks of her madness to a coyote, is contrasted with vernacular, naturalistic language elsewhere through the opera, ranging from “fuck yous” to “Yeah… not so much.” This is strained. When the opera veers occasionally into near comic territory, I couldn’t tell whether it was knowingly comic or not, as the humor seems to come not from the lines themselves, but from the the contrast between the lyrics and the context of the rest of the opera—or of opera itself—as, about a dick pic, “you can’t unsee that.” In another scene, characters livestream from the stage and it’s projected above as a Facebook Live (video design by Hannah Wasileski), complete with comments including, “Anybody else getting cult vibes?” and “this dude looks wack.” These got laughs, but distracted from the scene and the plot developments within it. These comments appear in the libretto.
Kyle convinces Claire to go to a support group, which turns out to be a cult lead by a Keith Raniere-like figure named Howard Bard (Kevin Burdette), who videotapes “confessions” of the hum-sufferers. This puts additional strains on Claire’s already troubled relationships with her husband and daughter (Troy Cook and Lindsey Reynolds as Paul and Ashley Devon), leading them to move out at the end of the first act—after the aforementioned Facebook live, where Claire has returned home to the least-believeable graffiti in the world spray painted neatly on her garage door: “Don’t fuck with our property value.” This is also in the libretto. Not only this, but Paul also accuses Claire of having an affair with Kyle, based solely on a single report that she was seen hugging him. This is the logic of a B movie.
The confessions are one of the most interesting parts of the show, opening both acts and recurring throughout.
It’s as if The Listeners is unaware that the most compelling—and operatic—part of its premise, is the shared auditory experience that these characters suffer, and has sidetracked itself with melodrama about a cult, without even seeming to understand what makes a cult leader compelling—or even really daring to show it to us. Instead, we see much more of Howard Bard being capricious, disciplining those who question him, one after the other, in front of the group. All cruelty, no charisma.
When the listeners share a collective intensifying of the hum, a revelation that they really are suffering from a shared, material condition, The Listeners leans away from this massive reveal and into a much more minor one: that Howard is a fraud who doesn’t himself hear the hum, which is not exactly a shock. Some chaos ensues, with the police inexplicably raiding the house. Except it’s not a raid, they surround the house and trigger (or the coyote triggers, as she carried a long gun through the scene) a shootout reminiscent of Waco that (or maybe the coyote does?) which even more inexplicably leaves Kyle, who is black, dead (this detail is not in the libretto). The inciting event for the police raid is supposedly the prior scene, where ex-military cult member Dillon is shooting a pistol and a cell tower—which, again, makes no sense—to which the police respond and, as they take Dillon into custody, he sings to them, “Fuck the Ranchlands family! They’re the fuckin’ crazy ones.”
The story is derived from a treatment by Jordan Tannahill, playwright, director, and novelist—including his own novel version of The Listeners, and I wonder whether the issues in the opera derive from Tannahill’s story or from Vavrek’s adaptation.
Lileana Blain-Cruz is kind of a hot theater director, a Yale drama alum in residence at Lincoln Center Theater and with a Tony nomination for The Skin of Our Teeth. She’s collaborated previously with lighting designer Yi Zhao, set designer Adam Rigg, and Wasileski. Blain-Cruz’s staging is most interesting when it’s using the massive, 40-ft turntable to spin the set and reveal new angles of what are otherwise fairly consistently symmetrical set pieces set parallel to the audience. With the upstage half of the turntable being usually devoted to turnover for the next scene, the staging sometimes crowds the chorus together creating a rather packed and somewhat claustrophobic picture for scenes in Howard’s cult house. I think these, like most of the other scenes, lack a literal depth, but the cult scenes work: it is not normal to have that many people in the living room of a McMansion. I did, however, take a note that some of them were underlit. The whole show leans dark, as you can see in the production photos, with the exception of some interior scenes, notably in Claire’s classroom which evokes both the brightness and the hum of fluorescent tubes.
There’s lots to bite into and chew here, and Blain-Cruz does much with the material even if the composer and librettist don’t know its own strengths. Much of the show is like this, a mixed bag. The video “confessions” are live-projected onto a scrim at the front of the stage, with the singers either in front of or behind the scrim, in scenes that introduce the acts. These vignettes offer the singers in these supporting roles, and their characters, space to shine, but I don’t think they contribute to the narrative build of this short opera. They also pose a practical issue: coming into the second act, some of the cameras were out of focus, an inexcusable technical problem when your singer's face is blown way, way up onto a giant screen.
The Listeners is fine, I guess. Probably not the kind of words you want to associate with the total art form. The production quality is robust (besides that one distracting technical issue), the music is grand and fitting, the songs well performed and the direction is sound, but the libretto, though it has moments, leaves much to be desired.
Whore’s Eye View
written and performed by Kaytlin Bailey
Christ Church Neighborhood House, September 21 to 23, as part of Cannonball/Philly Fringe
Kaytlin Bailey’s Whore’s Eye View has the level of polish you’d expect from a show that’s been touring internationally for a while. Part stand-up, part TED Talk, Bailey walks the audience through “10,000 years of history” from a sex worker’s perspective, specifically, her’s.
The show tries to do too much, going from Gilgamesh to Vietnam and tracing a brief history of demonization of whores to anti-prostitution laws. An entertaining hour, I think more depth would be effective here, magnifying the moments of Bailey’s personal history that ground the show. As she makes a case for decriminalization of sex-work, I wondered who the intended audience for this show is, as I imagine the typical person coming to see a show called Whore’s Eye View is going to be already-sympathetic and not need an hour long talk to convince them of the point. But it is, of course, a necessary argument. As Bailey observed, “sex work has funded more artists and Fringe performances than all of the grants.”
That concludes this edition of Plays Unpleasant. I will continue to release capsules looking back at this year’s Fringe over the rest of the month. I’ll also be reviewing Moreno, which is now in previews at InterAct and continues through November 24.