Conception
Transforming Darkling to the stage seemed possible when I first opened the book, as I saw potential in dramatizing the mind’s skittering inability to piece together fragments of memory and loss. I was also fascinated by Darkling’s use of the Thomas Hardy poem, “The Darkling Thrush,” because I had read several of his novels, and I had been haunted by his themes of marital discord.
The simplicity of most opera plots, though thought of as ridiculous, allow us to savor the extreme emotional states of life, and somehow extend them. Darkling does tell a tale of a hasty marriage in Poland on the eve of Hitler’s invasion, but we don’t need to follow this narratively, as memory cannot assemble it. The bride leaves for America, temporarily abandoning her new husband. The father of the bride is angered at his daughter’s sudden departure, and sings of hope that at least his son-in-law will say goodbye before he leaves for another world. But the son-in-law has already fled—just in time, joining his bride in a life of drudgery and marital incompatibility. Ultimately the couple is permanently separated from their extended families, who are presumably wiped out by the Holocaust.
But the bride and groom’s separation and reuniting really serve a ritualistic purpose, as the two elements of the Conjunctio or “Chemical Wedding.” The mind, certainly in its dream state and often in its wakened chatter, projects its own images and juxtaposes memories in ways that are scrambled and fleeting. Yet there is a universal process of psychological alchemy that refines our lives over time, and the process can involve years of intense pain and loss.
In the current world of electronic sound, when live music is employed, an attempt is often made to level a uniform listening environment by amplifying live musicians and singers. In order portray a dreamlike weaving in and out of chaos and confusion, we have chosen to embrace both integration as well as a texture of clashes between live and recorded sounds. Voices in the mind are sometimes difficult to grasp, somewhere locked in the closet of the subconscious, or appear just on the tip of the tongue.
The original poem by Anna Rabinowitz often plays with the inability to express the horrors of the 20th century. Thus, references to speaking or writing describe the indescribable: “congealed vowels,” “consonants of Unreachable destinies,” “scenarios sentenced to decomposed alphabets,” “redactors of the latest version of How To: How to be TRAPPED, How to be UNDERLINED FOR EXTERMINATION. Video projections allow words, shapes, and film fragments to appear and disappear as ghost images on all four surfaces of a black scrim barrier. Our “subtitles” for the sung section are there to follow as in a standard opera, but sometimes appear randomly, as they flash through the mind, half grasped.
In a three-sided theater the audience sits in their
own corner of the mind, receiving a slightly different visual and aural experience. Darkling can
be seen and heard as an operatic fantasia on themes of emotional fragmentation,
as we glance back from our troubled new century to the cataclysm of the last.
—Michael Comlish
Adaptor and Director
