Solstice Post...ice.

Well hello, there, friends. Thursday was the summer solstice, one of my favorite days.  I sat in the park and read, swung on the swings, and walked around until nightfall. The color of the sunlight in the evening, the absence of time brought about by the absence of darkness, and the lazy heat combined to pull humanity out of its singular, isolated self. At least, that's what they did to me. I felt, with all the cheesy glory that sentences like this encompass, connected to a deep river of life. It helped that I was sitting at a picnic table, reading "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," which is about a girl named Francie, growing up poor and Irish in Williamsburg. My grandmother, Frances, grew up poor and Irish in Sunset Park. When the book came out in 1943, her brother sent her a copy from the army, saying "I think you'll recognize this story." It also helped that I heard a lecture by Cornel West on the radio today, and when you listen to Cornel West for an hour, the whole "river of life" thing seems less like a cliché and more like a revolutionary statement.

I'm not going to preach about community, because Dr. West is approximately one million times better at it than I am. Also, this is an opera blog for the love of Izagi ed Izanami! I want to talk about theater, and what happens to an audience when theater is at its witchcrafty, alchemical best. What does this have to do with midsummer's night? What on earth does it have to do with Cornel West? Read on, brave river of humans, and find out.




My life and theater are entwined in my earliest memories. My parents had the great good sense (for which I am ever-grateful) to figure that a four-year-old who memorized The Wizard of Oz off of the soundtrack and made them reenact entire scenes with her might like to be in plays. A hammy disposition isn't the only thing that made me love theater, though. Being bossy was the other thing. Just kidding. What I loved and still love most about great theater is that its greatness is as tangible, practical, and repeatable, as it is unnameable, effusive, and fundamentally, beautifully fleeting.

I have experienced this from on the stage and off, in comedy, tragedy, opera, musicals, epic theater, and theater that I can't define. When people on stage have chemistry with one another and the audience, it is at least half planned. They have worked hard for that chemistry, even, and sometimes especially, if it is also spontaneous and natural. Truly great theater surprises the shit out of its audiences while simultaneously making them feel, with their entire being, the absolute truth and inevitability of the play. "I never saw that coming! But of course." Witchcrafty.

So, this has to do with opera because...why? Because I said so. But really because I'm an opera singer but I would rather spend an evening at a play, and on midsummer's evenings when I'm sitting in the park with the river of life carrying me along, I wonder why. I think it's because of the frequent absence of that intangible, hypnotic quality seen in great performances of regular old non-music theater. And I think that quality is missing because we, as an operatic community, leave it out. We are scared of it, scared that it will throw us off the stick, off our technique, off our marks. What we can learn from the regular old non-music theater world is that much of the spark we are looking for can be a part of all of these things, and that actors rehearse it into their lines, their voices, and their bodies as much as we rehearse our music if not more. While every evening in the theater is unique, few good ones are arbitrary. The reason the witchcraft works so well is that the sorcery has been practiced many times over.

The last play I saw was Venus In Fur, with Nina Arianda and Hugh Dancy. It was an incredible night of theater, and was one of those plays that leaves you with your heart racing in shock and delight and desire for more. Definitely an "I never saw that coming! But of course." experience. The performances from the two actors were what people often refer to as "tight." What does that mean? I think it means that they were both completely original and freakishly the same from night to night. Now, I have no real way of knowing this about Venus In Fur. But as an usher for other plays, I learned that the best performers were the most consistent, while also being the people who convinced me, six nights a week, that they had never said a single word of their lines before in their lives. That's the work that good actors do, and that's the work that we can do, that I have seen done by people like Frederica von Stade as Mrs. De Rocher in Dead Man Walking, by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson in Ariodante, Ailyn Perez as Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro.  They all happen to be ladies, but I think that's mostly because I'm a lady.

I know we are capable of doing this same work, of putting in this time and paying this attention. I'm ending this post in such a similar way to my last one, it's a little freaky. But still, let's do the work. I want to make people feel the way I've felt at great performances, and I know more opera can be elemental and witchcrafty in the same way. If the end of The Seagull can come as a beautiful, terrible surprise, so can the end of any opera. I, for one, am staying in the river.