NEW YORK — If there was any theme unifying the two wildly different one-acts premiered by Experiments in Opera (EiO) on March 20 at off-off-Broadway’s The Tank, it was modes of communication. From the micro-personal to the cosmic, both Jason Cady’s This Is Not About Natalie and Anna Heflin’s The INcomplete Cosmicomics featured a character desperate to make a faceless audience understand him or her.
Paired in an evening called “SOLOperas” (there was no consensus among EiO staff whether that should be pronounced as written or as “solo operas”), the works were presented in a small black-box space with audience on three sides and very little onstage, and only one performer per opera. Well, sort of.
Kris, the main character in This Is Not About Natalie, is a punk-rock songwriter with a singing ventriloquist dummy. It was momentarily disappointing to realize that the fabulous soprano Sarah Daniels had not found some physiology-defying way to sing operatically without moving her lips. Instead (and quite logically), Daniels’ doll, named Sunny, had a playback device under its little frock and pre-recorded vocals by Daniels at the ready. Director Shannon Sindelar helped make the interaction between the singer and her hand- and psyche-extension seem natural and humorous, playing with the constant static of the ego against the id.
The other aspect of communication in Cady’s opera is Kris’ relationship with her viewers: She makes songs for a daily YouTube video series. We find her just starting this enterprise, having recently split with her longtime performing partner, the Natalie mentioned in the opera’s title. A tripod holding an iPhone downstage center is the focus of her attention; she sings her rock songs (marked as “arias” in the libretto) and checks the comments and emojis. Her viewers want her to talk about why she broke up with Natalie. Sunny does, too. Only Kris is determined to ignore the issue clearly weighing on her.
Turns out Natalie only wanted success, whereas Kris wants artistic integrity. Until the end, that is, when the growing viewership of Kris’ show prompts Natalie to invite her on tour as an opening act. Kris coyly acknowledges her own hypocrisy, her willingness to jump onto the very bandwagon she’s been disparaging. After a climax in which Sunny’s playback box multiplies the puppet’s voice five-fold, the word “harmony” is reduced to its essential last two syllables: money. The opera’s plot rang true as a representation of most struggling, idealistic artists.
Daniels has a powerful yet flexible voice. Although she wasn’t singing both Kris’ and Sunny’s parts live, she was in for an Olympian vocal workout for the entire 30-minute opera, constantly bombarded by a blaring synthesizer score, not to mention her own electric guitar, which she played live during her arias. More stylistic differentiation — perhaps some moments of contrasting melody types — would have been welcome. Interestingly, despite the up-to-the-moment aspects of both score and story, Cady sticks to definitions of recitative (conversational language that moves the plot along), arioso (more stylized conversation, in this case with clever internal rhymes), and aria (songs exploring the character’s emotions) that have been standard since the 17th century.
There is absolutely nothing standard about Heflin’s The INcomplete Cosmicomics. Its only recognizable element of opera, in fact, is the combination of human voice and music. The solo performer, Aaron Wolff, is not even a singer, although he sings a bit. He is, however, an exceptionally gifted cellist — his instrument sounded thrilling in the small, cube-shaped space — and an effective storyteller and comic actor.
This unabashedly intellectual riff on the work of novelist and short-story writer Italo Calvino (1923-85) introduces us to Qfwfq (pronounced, approximately, “kuh-FIH-fuh-kuh”), a sort of celestial being who acts as narrator in many of Calvino’s science fiction-tinged stories, including those of his book Cosmicomics. Dressed in a dark blue bodysuit vaguely implying space travel (costumes by Krista Intranuovo Pineman), Wolff explains — primarily in spoken word — that he has been stuck in a void for 2000 years with nothing but a cello and a looper, a synthesizer that captures sound and can replay and layer it at prescribed temporal intervals.
The piece opens with Wolff taking his pulse at his neck and singing the syllables “om” and “hum,” presumably in time with his heartbeat, alternating pitches a half-step up and down. These sounds he feeds through the looper operated by his sock-clad feet, then uses the prerecorded mixture as backdrop while he starts a narrative about his existence. Qfwfq is fully cognizant of having been created by Calvino; indeed, the whole libretto is self-aware and “meta.” As the character explains, “I’ve been summoned off the Calvino page to reclaim my voice.”
Each section of the opera — is it an opera? — starts with Wolff reciting a short tale in the style of Calvino. He then analyzes his character’s presence in the story, sometimes mentioning literary criticism of Calvino, such as fellow author Ursula K. LeGuin’s complaints that Qfwfq’s portrayal was one-dimensional and sexist in the relationships with female entities that drove the stories.
But these academic arguments are not the centerpiece of the work. That would be Wolff’s cello playing. Sometimes it seems carefully composed, as he draws long, intense melodies from the strings and loops them against each other, creating chamber music. Other times it is improvised, aleatoric, using the entire spectrum of pitches and textures available on the instrument, including extended techniques such as the crunch of bow hair on against the wooden bridge.
The last section is a tribute to Morton Feldman. Qfwfq muses on what a composer so fascinated by time and the duration of sound would do with infinite time and a looper. He then considers the looper as a metaphor for the stories in Cosmicomics: They don’t really have plots, just “situations” that keep coming around again. Qfwfq declares, “I need to break the loop.”
But he doesn’t. Instead, he draws the audience into his void. Long — overlong — passages float over an ocean of looped sound: his hands swirling thousands of plastic beads in a tray; his bow pulled slowly up the fingerboard and down again hundreds of times, imitating breath; nonsense whispers woven together into a forest of murmurs, evoking Glenn Gould’s spoken-word contrapuntal radio play The Idea of North. We’re trapped there with him, wondering when time will end, all part of the work’s sly humor and eternal cosmic peace.
