SAN FRANCISCO — Despite budget cutbacks that have reduced the number of opera productions to a mere six this season, the San Francisco Opera has at least been on a winning streak of consequential contemporary operas within the past year: First came Rihannon Giddens’ Omar in November, then Kaija Saariaho’s Innocence in June, and now Poul Ruders and Paul Bentley’s The Handmaid’s Tale — which received its West Coast premiere Sept. 14 at the War Memorial Opera House. In these powerful works, San Francisco Opera took on racial issues (Omar), mass shootings (Innocence), and women’s rights (The Handmaid’s Tale). Incidentally, War Memorial is a fitting home for operas dealing with the lingering problems of our time: After all, this is the place where the U.N. had its first conference back in 1945.
The Handmaid’s Tale is not a brand-new opera like the other two, having been written in the late 1990s; it received its world-premiere performance and recording in Copenhagen in 2000. The work is based on Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s eponymous 1985 dystopian novel, reportedly a reaction to the rise of the religious right during the Reagan era with a sidelong glance at the Islamic Republic of Iran. Both book and opera take the premises of these movements to the extreme, though Atwood claims that the appalling practices in the story have all occurred somewhere in real life.
We behold a nightmarish, theocratic country called the Republic of Gilead (centered in New England) that overthrew the United States around the year 2005 in the wake of a number of environmental disasters. Women have been stripped of their rights and forbidden to work, read, write, or own property of any kind. If they violate marriage laws and are of child-bearing age, they are ripped away from their families and forced to undergo ritualized rapes in order to bear children for childless couples — all in the name of fundamentalist Christianity. The central figure is a handmaid whose real name is unknown, simply referred to as Offred — meaning the property of Fred, the Commander, at whose home she is stationed for the purpose of conceiving his child.
I found Atwood’s novel to be a tough read. “Written” in first-person by the handmaid, there are endless stretches of scene-setting and very little forward drive in the narrative. The Epilogue is the best part, a funny satire on scholarly symposiums set in the year 2195 in which a professor is delivering a keynote address about some newly uncovered, 200-year-old cassettes containing the spoken memoirs of the handmaid.
With an English-language libretto by Bentley (the recording is sung in a Danish translation), the opera is actually better than the book, much more straight-ahead in its progression and more emotionally charged. In the original libretto, the symposium conveniently bookends the story, making the tale a flashback — or more accurately, a double flashback — since it inserts episodes that occurred before the Gileadian revolution. Thus, we see glimpses of Offred’s life the way it used to be when she was a young girl happily married to a divorced man (a no-no in Gilead).
While Ruders’ score is often a vivid depiction of the nightmare, full of frightening, dissonant crescendos and orchestral explosions, there are passages of solemn, subtle grandeur when religious dogma is being recited by rote. Minimalist patterns animate the flashbacks. One of the characters, Serena Joy, the barren wife of the Commander, was a televangelist in the time Before Gilead, and strains of “Amazing Grace” — which she had sung in days past — are threaded throughout the score.
The brief scene with the Doctor (tenor Matthew DiBattista) examining — and propositioning — Offred reminds me of a similarly surreal doctor/patient encounter in Berg’s Wozzeck. Aunt Lydia, the tyrannical stickler for rules who bosses the handmaids around, is given a high-wire soprano line; the supertitles were necessary to figure out what her words were. The older Offred can be seen observing the younger Offred in flashback scenes in which the music often takes on a haunting, hallucinatory multi-layer form, and the two sometimes interact in song. The percussion corps uses a wide variety of instruments; I even heard a typewriter at one point that may have come from a sampler keyboard, since it wasn’t listed as part of their arsenal.
Conductor Karen Kamensek, an experienced hand with contemporary opera (especially Philip Glass’ works), and the San Francisco Opera Orchestra made the score shine with startling widescreen clarity and point. She reportedly took some pains in “diffusing” the tone clusters and “clearing out” the textures; to my ears, her way worked better than the knottier Danish orchestral playing on the recording.
Other simplifications in the San Francisco staging — a co-production with the Royal Danish Theatre postponed from 2020 due to the Covid shutdown — probably went a bit too far: Restoring some of the elaborate stage directions at the outset, including a film montage depicting the revolution, would have added some context to make it clearer what was happening. The Symposium Prologue and Epilogue bookends were also cut; thus, among other things, we don’t know that the Republic of Gilead itself would eventually be overthrown and studied by incredulous future scholars.
Nevertheless, the John Fulljames production makes a potent, properly alarming impression as is, whisking the action up to the year 2030, six years after the revolution is set to take place (i.e., this year). Set designer Chloe Lamford, who also came up with the rotating cube set for Innocence, went for a stark minimalist look this time, with a former schoolroom turned into stone-gray barracks for the handmaids and modern glass walls backing the Commander’s living space. A huge Eye of Providence — an eye encased in a triangle that is often associated with Freemasonry and present on the reverse of our one-dollar bills — overlooks some of the action from the rear, a Big-Brother-is-always-watching image.
Of the large, talented cast, Offred is almost always the center of attention — and the brave mezzo-soprano Irene Roberts completely inhabited the role, often in cooler lyrical contrast to some of the more overwrought characters. It couldn’t have been easy to perform, since her character has to undergo humiliating simulated sexual procedures. But she came through it all just fine, injecting some raw passion into what must have been painful arias to sing. The younger Offred, mezzo-soprano Simone McIntosh, was a good match for her both physically and in voice.
Bass John Relyea infused the Commander with a deep, pompous voice while quoting Scripture prior to the ritual rape, and mezzo-soprano Lindsay Ammann gradually transitioned from a welcoming figure to an imperious, spiteful one as Serena Joy. Soprano Sarah Cambidge did what she could to make Aunt Lydia’s lines intelligible, with limited success. Soprano Caroline Corrales (Offred’s rebellious friend Moira) and mezzo-soprano Gabrielle Beteag (the young Offred’s mom) were portrayed as post-hippie free spirits caught in a hostile fundamentalist regime.
In the end, we don’t know for sure what happens to Offred when the “police” come to take her away. Is it the Gilead police, or is it the underground rebels taking her to safety in Canada — as possibly signaled by the Commander’s chauffeur Nick (tenor Brenton Ryan) when he quietly gives Offred the code word “Mayday”? What we do get in this riveting opera is a dramatic warning as to what can happen to a pluralistic society when troubles reach a critical mass.
