NEW YORK — With conciliatory social awareness, Laura Kaminsky’s new opera The Post Office ran May 16-21 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Fisher Space with a Kafka-esque wall of mail crates, an impressive cast of singers, and well-crafted music. It portrays the gay-marriage debate with nothing new to say.
“I contain multitudes” — the famous Walt Whitman line — is heard early on as an emblem of the U.S. postal system and individual branches that are an equalizing crossroads for everyday American humanity. Originally discussed as a possible song cycle with poems by Elaine Sexton, this co-production by American Opera Projects and the BAM evolved into a five-character piano-accompanied opera with a libretto by Sexton.
The basis of the opera is real-life turmoil in Eastern Long Island. Gay and straight postal employees clash over their right to have photos of their respective spouses fully displayed in the workspace. The surprise is that — with both authors in same-sex marriages — the LGBTQ characters are mere points of reference in a piece intent on understanding the other side of the debate. For the ultra-conservative postal worker Ben (sung with the well-buffed tone of baritone Markel Reed), his long-inherited religious culture fosters beliefs too visceral to be easily changed.
The soul of the opera is the least outspoken character — a female postal worker (sung with great inward feeling by Sarah Moulton Faux) who has to work two jobs to make ends meet, would love to see America be great again but needs to put gas in her car. All of that comes to a head in a powerfully sung high note (a B, I’m told) that communicates desperation underneath the surfaces. Also present is Benjamin Franklin, the first postmaster general: His words are in pre-show letters randomly distributed to the viewers (mine was about saying the right thing but knowing when to be quiet). His physical presence, capably portrayed by David Adam Moore, emerges deus-ex-machina style from an opening in the wall of mail crates.
In a series of ariosos, the characters come round to each other, not agreeing but at least achieving mutual respect, and directed by Kevin Newbury in a naturalistic manner suggesting that this type of debate is, in some form or another, an everyday negotiation in our polarized society. But this particular dramatization of the issues may be outdated. My 2026 employment experience at a Long Island mental health agency indicates that the workplace is for work, not disclosure of one’s off-hours life.
However, The Post Office doesn’t seem destined to follow in the successful footsteps of Kaminsky’s 2014 opera As One. The Sexton libretto’s agitprop sensibility has too few dimensions with scant personality among the characters.
Kaminsky’s word-centered manner isn’t about to override the libretto, though she revealed her compositional depth in the post-performance May 17 panel discussion: She set up a compositional challenge revolving around the number 13 (the original United States), often with notes arranged in two groups of five and one group of three. To the uninformed ear, the lack of duple symmetry created intriguingly unstable cross rhythms in a high-momentum frame for the long-breathed vocal lines.
Sexton’s small-town toxicity remains possible whatever the safeguards, the message being that all sides need to keep talking to each other. It’s imperative. As for the post office, it’s a character unto itself here. The wall of mail crates turns colors — red, white, and blue — and some crates are pulled out to reveal long, morgue-like drawers. Perhaps scenic designer Charles Renfro (the noted architect) intended them to be receptacles for dead ideas?
As masterful as her piano writing, played by Daniel Gortler, is, Kaminsky really isn’t so well represented by her opera scores. Her chamber music reflects a full modernist arsenal, including unlikely influences including Conlon Nancarrow. Her Piano Concerto is a rich, exotic, freewheeling world that must be heard to be believed. That music definitely makes a statement.
