Critical Analysis
New York Observer
Acute in its musical reach and dead smart as theater, American Opera Projects’ Darkling (through March 18; Classic Stage Company, 136 E.13th St., 212-279-4200; $30/45) courses with charged generosity. Directed by Michael Comlish, performed with aplomb by its actors and singers, the production dares its way out on a limb yet keeps brash stage tactics harnessed to the service of powerful themes.
Derived from poet Anna Rabinowitz’s book, Darkling roves from Holocaust-era Poland to the Lower East Side, twining immigrant hope and loss with thorny intensity (“How many untold tales within a tale?” asked another poet, Edmond Jabès). Rabinowitz’s verse flows earthy (“feet reeking like decayed potatoes in the corner store”) then gnomic in its mourning pursuit of memory, spiced by a canny plethora of projections on the set’s massive scrim chamber, with shuffled PA voice-overs most resonant in Elzbieta Czyzweska’s amber diction.
Taut arias recall Schoenberg’s monodramas and Bartok’s hard-hitting Bluebeard’s Castle: mezzo Hai-Ting Chinn, backlit, descends stairs from nowhere; soprano Jody Scheinbaum’s penetrating phrases cleave the drama. Stefan Weisman’s score, played by the Flux Quartet, orbits near Shostakovich’s gripping string quartet cycle then gleans wafting minimalism.
Tableaux meld with Martha Clark’s gorgeous, genre-blending solemnity, while sexy black gear and a majorette pivot by Broome Street hat makers jolt like Richard Foreman’s mute, antic choruses. A projected poem resolves into an acrostic; its first letters quote a late Thomas Hardy poem that baritone Marcus DeLoach will sing from a perch over the exit, where audiences take Darkling’s exquisite impact out into the world.
—NEW YORK OBSERVER
Steve Smith
Half-tones in half-dark
At the end of Darkling—a new opera-cum-multimedia music-theater work previewed in full for the first time by American Opera Projects on Sunday afternoon—baritone Marcus DeLoach climbs to the rafters of a small, black-box in full Victorian kit, there to sing Lee Hoiby’s richly chromatic setting of the Thomas Hardy poem, “The Darkling Thrush.” Starting to think about the piece from its conclusion might seem peculiar,were it not for the fact that Darkling is in some sense as much a musical expansion of its final number as the book-length poem by Anna Rabinowitz on which this opera is based was built upon a skeleton provided by Hardy's poem.
Rabinowitz’s book deals in fragmentary memories of family known and unknown—specifically a Jewish family sundered by Nazi politics, reconstructed via letters found in a shoebox. Her poem is constructed as an acrostic, the first letter of each line combining to render Hardy’s poem. Likewise, Stefan Weisman's dark, elusive score is an explosion of themes and motives extracted from the Hoiby song, stretched into an 80-minute progression of solo and ensemble numbers performed by a quartet of opera singers and a string quartet — punctuated by interludes spoken by the poet and actors, as well as pre-recorded soundscapes by Tom Hamilton.
Apart from DeLoach’s song, the whole of the work takes place within the boundaries of a box defined by translucent scrims, affording the audience an access held at some slight remove. Projected texts and manuscripts illuminate the walls of the enclosure; singers and dancers move within, presenting a non-narrative series ofimages describing Jewish life in Europe before and during the war, as well as the strained relations between those who escaped to America (including Rabinowitz’s parents) and those who remained behind.
Director Michael Comlish, who conceived the dramatization of Rabinowitz's poem, intersperses scenes of operatic lyricism and gravitas with quirky, theatrical interludes—one early scene in particular, which mingled black boots,bustiers and Orthodox garb with oblique blocking and abrupt sound effects, suggested a Richard Foreman-steered production of Cabaret. Strikingly kinetic enactments of old photographs and silent films evoke time and place.
Weisman’s score is likewise shot through with an old-world melancholy, accentuated by Flux Quartet leader Tom Chiu's keening violin lines. The composer took full advantage of his operatic principals–soprano Jody Scheinbaum, mezzo Hai-Ting Chinn, tenor Jon Garrison and bass-baritone Mark Uhlemann—each of whom was afforded an opportunity to stand out, to rich effect. Chinn and Uhlemann commanded rich, distinctive and replendent instruments. Scheinbaum, whose voice was smaller, projected with a winning charm and physical agility. Garrison's impassioned solo number, performed in beard and gown, summoned thoughts of Halévy's tortured Elezar.
But Darkling is a work of busy ensemble interaction, and non-singing actors played as great a role as the vocalists—none more so than Sid Williams, who at one point transformed in the blink of an eye from a smiling, waving Fiorello LaGuardia into a Nazi mouthpiece who reported the final solution in the terminology of an art critic, even as the action onstage artfully rendered the unthinkable.
Since this afternoon's performance was a preview, my thoughts should be read as reflection rather than review. But really, productions like this remind you that all too much light is cast upon the Met and City Opera–and even San Francisco and Houston—to define what new opera is, or might be. Let Darkling serve as a reminder that opera can also be what and where it is found. This is a profound, provocative piece of musical theater—one that I hope will occasion a great many opera lovers to stray from habitual paths. As specific as the context of Darkling may be, its message is ultimately universal.
—NIGHT AFTER NIGHT (#1 CLASSICAL MUSIC BLOG)
Lisa Quintela
An unlikely collaboration of Wagner, Sally Bowles and Steven Spielberg could have spawned Darkling, a Holocaust chamber opera with satirical cabaret touches. Based on the 2001 poem by Anna Rabinowitz, the multimedia work follows fragmented memories of a Jewish family before and during World War II.
Letters and photographs pertaining to the relatives of Rabinowitz’s father illustrate the severed bond between those who escaped to America and those who remained behind. The author constructed her verse as an acrostic to Thomas Hardy’s mournful poem “The Darkling Thrush,” which is colorfully set to music for the final song and grafted onto measures in the rest of Stefan Weisman’s expressionistic score. The irony of a Holocaust piece sung operatically in English, in all of its Germanic affectation, is hard to ignore, especially when combined with a keening string quartet perched above themain stage.
A translucent scrim encloses a black box, separating the audience from the actors, whose impassioned performances make up for small voices ranging from soprano to bass-baritone. Prerecorded parlando, or operatic speech, mingles with live singing, subtitles and projected film to create a sense of chaos, helplessness and anomie. Director Michael Comlish steers his inventive production with a blend of Brechtian verfremdungs-effekt (“alienation effect”) and abstract, dancerly movement. Opera snobs and novices alike won’t regret wandering downtown for more-daring fare.
—TIMEOUT NY
Megan Jenkins
The East Thirteenth Street Theatre is so unprepossessing that it would be easy to miss it altogether. From the street the entrance looks like an ice cream shop more so than a theatre. The crowded foyer has chairs around little tables and a food service counter.
Behind this façade and through sets of double doors is a dark, intimate theatre with seating on three sides of an open performance area. The stage, which is really just the space in the center of the room, is completely surrounded by translucent screens onto which Hardy’s poem is projected. In this dim, almost secret space, American Opera Projects, Inc. is doing great things.
Recently at the East Thirteenth Street Theatre AOP presented Darkling, a new opera that is so multi-layered it defies description. Anna Rabinowitz’s response to coming into possession of some family letters and postcards dating from the Holocaust was to write the long poem Darkling (2001). Rabinowitz used Thomas Hardy’s poem of 1 January 1900 “The Darkling Thrush” to guide her in the writing of her own poem—specifically, Rabinowitz’s Darkling is a loose acrostic based on Hardy’s poem. In addition to the acrostic, the Hardy poem also inspired the somber mood of Darkling, as well as its moments of brightness.
Director Michael Comlish adapted Darkling to the opera stage, creating a new, multi-media work based completely on Rabinowitz’s poem. At an after-performance Q and A panel with the creators of Darkling, Comlish emphasized that every word was Rabinowitz’s including the arialike sections, the words spoken by the actor-singers, the texts projected onto the walls of the theatre, and the texts performed on the taped “soundscape.” Through these media, nearly all the lines of the poem Darkling were expressed somewhere in the opera. Comlish worked closely with composer Stefan Weisman and a host of designers to realize his vision for this multi-media event.
Weisman looked to the setting of Hardy’s poem by Lee Hoiby, a song that has been popularized by such luminaries as Leontyne Price and Jean Stapleton. The entire work was concluded with a straightforward performance the Hoiby setting, allowing the audience to access both the musical and poetic works that inspired the various creators of Darkling.
The thirteen performers of Darkling had the difficult task of capturing the audience’s imaginations and hearts without the safeguard of a plot, and they succeed in this admirably. Neither the poem nor the opera has clear narrative thread; rather, according to Rabinowitz, the fragmented nature of the opera reflects the fragmented nature of her poem, which in turn points toward the history told by the letters, postcards, photos, and other documents from her family’s experiences in the Holocaust. The opera, like the letters, allows us to glimpse a small piece of history—the histories of particular individuals and of a war.
In 80 minutes of intense visual and aural stimulation, Darkling achieves moments of powerful emotion. At times I felt moved to tears, though I cannot quite explain all the details that contributed to that because so much was happening simultaneously. A postcard advertising Darkling features a line from Rabinowitz’s poem, asking “who will acknowledge things of darkness as their own?” Indeed, the work places the onus of understanding and acknowledging on the audience. Through lighting, projection, stage effects, and choreography, the creators of Darkling make the audience a part of the performance, demanding one’s attention at all times.
At the Q and A session, one of the creators on the panel mentioned that Darkling makes abstract ideas and music accessible, to which an audience member replied, and I paraphrase, ‘not really.’ I don’t think this gentleman was criticizing the opera—indeed, it seemed that everyone who stayed to hear the panel really enjoyed it—I think that he was pointing out that the unfamiliarity of the form of the work was disconcerting or disorienting. I suspect that this disorientation was planned all along because by not presenting the story in a linear fashion or filling in any pragmatic details, Darkling requires the listener to engage in some contemplation.
The listener gets out of the opera what she or he put into engaging with the material. There is an optimistic message to be found Darkling. Rabinowitz pointed out at the Q and A that in the Hardy poem the darkling thrush of the title chooses to sing despite the bleakness all around.
In Darkling, the Jewish couple whose fate we are following survives the Holocaust almost by accident when they come to America. There is gloom all around them in the form of their loveless marriage and poverty in the United States, but I sense that in a way, this very production is possible only because they struggled on.
Clearly, this is only one reading of an intensely complicated work of art. Bravo to AOP for supporting such controversial and ultimately important work, and to the creative minds that fitted it all together in a thought-provoking way.
—OPERA TODAY
Pick of the Week
Finally, the Gothamist pick of the week is Darkling, a mix of opera and theatre directed by Michael Comlish and based on a book-length poem by Anna Rabinowitz. That work is an unflinching, though fragmented, look at her family’s Holocaust experience, which she confronted after finding a shoebox of photos and letters. Stefan Weisman composed most of the music; it’s being produced by American Opera Projects, which is dedicated to pushing the boundaries of opera. It sounds dark, complicated, and intense, and we suspect that regardless of your level of interest in either theater or opera, you'll be stunned by it, in a good way.
—GOTHAMIST
