Winding down, winding up

Lynne and I are off to Bulgaria to see the premiere of Certitude and Joy and to place wreathes of remembrance on the tombs of the Thracian kings and to investigate the painting techniques of their National Awakening. Queer is just about wrapped up, adjudicated most positively by the expectantly swollen audiences of the last weekend.  It was lovely as always to see old friends come out, and lovely to make some new connections as well. 

All the performers and crew were fantastic, Joe Wicht lighting up the stage even more brightly this time than last, the person on whose shoulders the piece rests, whose jersey number should be retired along with the show. Ken Berry flew in from Australia to reprise his roles, even more endearing and funny this time than last. And those who were new to cast – James Graham and the regally named pair of Diana Consuelo Hopping Rais and Jorge Rodolfo De Hoyos Jr. – were riveting to watch as they threaded their way through the landscape. It was great to work with Bryan Nies from the Oakland East-Bay Symphony and all the other musicians – Jab and Marja Mutru and Michele Walther and David Sullivan – all the musicians yours truly, who seemed to think that he could play the guitar again after a 10 year hiatus, even though he used the same guitar and strings, lovingly preserved by Thom Blum in a special place, under glass in the crypt below the laundry room leading out to Franklin Street.  And who can forget Jim Cave, my main man, who has helped make all of the operas he has touched into something real, making them into the thing that I remember them to be after the greasepaint has dried and the last playbill is swept up?  Clyde Sheets once again has made some art, as he has done so often, and Laura Hazlett arrived at a costume design that I myself wish I could be transported into, flicking the ash from my Gitanes to the dusty street. Cid Pearlman, who fixed so many small motions, focusing in, adding beauty. I am the producer of this work, and not just the composer, the one who picks up the music stands and rolls the piano out of the way each night, and, as such, I can't tell you how important it is to have a crew on whom to rely: Catherine Reser the stage manager and gun handler, who, after a misfire one night, took it upon herself to check the load of each blank, to inspect the crimping, to check the smell of the black powder for its correct bouquet, and Will McCandless and Dylan McMillen. And thanks to Greg Kuhn, who didn't sleep for weeks before, during and after. 

The work is OK. I've decided this now after seeing and hearing and playing it again. I originally thought that it was a quick bit of flummery knocked off while waiting for the funding to come through for Sub Pontio Pilato, but in playing it again, I hear things I didn't hear before, and once again I am shown that the quickly-written piece allows the channeling of the music-god-all-one-faith-spirit to guide one's hand, while the labored work suffers from too much from mere human frailties. 

More on Chosen

A 23-year-old woman who said she was hearing voices stripped her three small children naked Wednesday and threw them off a San Francisco fishing pier into the bay, authorities said.  - San Francisco Chronicle, October 20, 2005

I grew up in a religious family and, in my youth, longed for the kind of religious experience that would give me the certainty of faith that held my parents. They told me stories: once, when my sister was very ill and a blizzard raged outside, and they were sitting late at night in the living room, not knowing whether to brave the dangerous storm to drive to a doctor and risk all their lives in the process, the room was suffused with a warm and reassuring light, a presence that informed them clearly that all would be well, that they didn't have to worry. They both saw it, they both felt it, they both were sure that their daughter was safe and, as the morning came, my sister's fever broke and all was well. My mother, otherwise a very learned woman who knew Hebrew and Greek, who wrote books and plays, and who would talk to me of philosophy and her passion for feminism, also spoke in tongues, a charismatic babbling of nonsense syllables, an ecstatic experience, one of the gifts given to the apostles in Acts. As a young boy interested in mathematics, a world which I was beginning to look for certitude and intellectual comfort, I also knew of the work of Pascal who, even though a proponent of the Age of Reason, had sewn into his coat a detailed, irrational description of a moment in his life when he was absolutely certain of the truth of the Christian Faith. I couldn't shake the idea that this might be something necessary to survive in this world, an otherwise frightening place of chaos, illness, genocide, war, death, hunger and pain. But at the same time that I lusted after such an episode, I began also to fear it, seeing it as madness, a profound loss of my rational mind which was becoming more and more important to me. My friends in high school, who all sought their own quasi-religious experiences in hallucinogens and the attendant loss of identity, offered them to me, but by then, I could not let go. I felt I was already on the razor's edge between the bright light of sanity and the dark night of lunacy. Neither the faith of my parents or the home-grown sacred rites of my friends were able to convince me to take such a risk and I remained on the side of lucidity and reason, of sound and careful thinking. 

In 2005, a young woman in San Francisco was told by God to throw her three children into the Bay, which she did, undressing them and killing them all in a brief ritual after a day spent in San Francisco, sightseeing and eating hot dogs. I had seen the story in the paper, but had forgotten it among all the other news equally shocking. A few days after, I was riding my bicycle on the Embarcadero and came across an enormous pile of flowers and stuffed animals and notes and candles, damp from a soft evening mist off the water. I stopped and looked at it, not remembering why it was there until I looked up and saw the lamplights of pier 7 receding from where I stood into the dusk over the bay, a corridor of light to another world, and I remembered that this is where she sent her children through that corridor to the other world. I remembered that she had told the police that the children were with their Father, meaning not her boyfriend, their earthly father, but with their Father in Heaven. Later, as I read more about the case, I discovered her clear and childlike faith, e.g, her poignant request to the police psychologist that he take a letter up in a plane to her children in Heaven. Of course she was schizophrenic, with all the clinical signs of the disease appearing in her young adulthood, a typical time of onset. But, when someone reminded me of the story just last year during a discussion of Medea, the images of the pier and the lights and the unspeakable terror of the three young boys being killed by the mother came back to me and I began to wonder. How could she be so certain of God's voice? I had wanted that certainty of faith, I had been afraid of the consequences, like these. I knew of the Abraham and Isaac story too of course, which Christians happily accept as a instructive tale, how we should blindly accept the commandments of God, following His voice without question. We all know that we now live in a world where we focus daily on the terrible actions inspired by religious certitude. 

In writing the libretto, I have mixed her story and mine, accepting that she was in communication with God, that he told her to kill her children, that there is something compelling about her certainty. The piece is an opera, but not in any way a traditional one. The main characters are played by two dancers who dominate the action on stage. A singer is present who mostly takes her place in the orchestra, an ensemble centered around two pianos, who thunder out a music that ranges from dark and dense to the beautiful and serene. There is one actor as well, who moves through the dancers and presents much of the story plainly to the audience. There is no technology in this piece unlike many of my others. It is presented starkly and without adornment, a series of choices made and their consequences, great faith surrounded by our doubt.

to those who are of god's chosen

I've embarked on a new opera project, even though I was feeling like I was a bit fagged out after the difficulties of the last, but once again hath the candle singd the moath, and I find myself in familiar territory, exploring the viscous friction of sense and nonsense at the boundaries of religion. It all started when I ventured to see a bit of a new Deborah Slater piece at the Traveling Jewish Theater and watched some of my most favorite dancers move gorgeously across the stage. Later, outside, Lynne and Deborah and I were talking, the Medea story came up and Lynne asked if we remembered how, a few years back, a woman threw her three children in the bay. Of course we did and, for memory's sake, here is the news item:

A 23-year-old woman who said she was hearing voices stripped her three small children naked Wednesday and threw them off a San Francisco fishing pier into the bay, authorities said. - San Francisco Chronicle, October 20, 2005

In fact, I remembered it very well, because Lynne and I happened across the makeshift memorial a few days after it occurred: flowers, stuffed animals, notes, photos, candles; all left in a vain attempt to palliate the horror of the crime. The story rolled around in my head for many days after that discussion, and I ended up buying a small notebook and some pens on a visit to Lynne's family

and I started writing something and had some very clear images of the look of it and that my dancer friends would be acting out the parts, maybe singers off stage, don't know, but when I started writing, I immediately mixed together the mother's thoughts and mine so that, in the end, there is definitely more of me than of her in it, but I started from the point that God and the mother really were talking and, like Abraham and Isaac, God really did tell her to kill her children, and that there is something compelling about her certainty, a religious certainty that many people crave. The text consists mostly of her internal monologue, but God speaks, and the children appear as well. She speaks like me, the version of me that graces many of these blog entries: a bit supercilious, a few too many five dollar words, but of course it really is me, my religious upbringing (although the mother was quite religious herself), my fascination with the non-rational, the ecstatic, my fear of insanity, my fear of a lack of ability to discern what is real and what is not.