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The 10,000 ticketholders for the 15 performances of
Peter Sellars' Mozart-Da Ponte trilogy --The Marriage of
Figaro, Don Giovanni and Cosi fan tutte -- at the
10th and final PepsiCo Summerfare this July in Purchase, N.Y.,
got an experience that spoiled them for life. Especially those
who witnessed all three productions in two weekend cycles came
away with first-hand knowledge of how, in the 10 years since
he first staged Don Giovanni for the Monadnock Musick
Festival in New Hampshire, Sellars has succeeded in
redefiniing the standards of American opera production. For
here were productions of three great Mozart operas in which
the values of music, acting, staging, design, architecture and
audience appreciation achieved extraordinary parity.
Granted, the circumstances under which these productions were
created are extraordinary in themselves. Sellars has assembled
around him a minirepertory company like none other in this
country. The conductor Craig Smith, several key singers
(including Sanford Sylvan, James Maddelena, Susan Larson and
Frank Kelley), a number of key musicians (including cellist
Shannon Natale and pianist Suzanne Cleverdon) and the entire
design crew (James Ingalls for lights, Dunya Ramicova for
costumes, Adrianne Lobel and George Tsypin for sets) have all
worked repeatedly, many of them for at least a decade, on
Sellars' operas -- including Nixon in China, his
best-known production and the only one that has been both
televised and recorded. [note: This is no longer true. All the
Mozart-Da Ponte productions were videotaped and televised,
though only Figaro is available commercially.]
As the National Endowment for the Arts acknowledged in its
visionary program of grants to ongoing ensembles, the benefits
of having a company of artists work together over time are
incalculable. And the ensemble spirit among Sellars and his
company has been nurtured to its current high state largely
under the auspices of Christopher Hunt, the brilliant and
adventuresome director of Summerfare during its last five
seasons. Hunt first invited Sellars and crew to Purchase in
1985, when they performed Handel's Julius Caesar (Giulio
Cesare in Egitto) as well as an evening of Brecht and
Weill's Little Mahagonny with a program of Bach
cantatas. Over the next three summers, the company tackled the
Mozart-Da Ponte trilogy one by one, performing them in the
670-seat Theatre B of the State University of New York's
Performing Arts Centre, a space that is (compared to the
Metropolitan Opera or the State Theater at Lincoln Center)
almost shockingly intimate and uncommonly conducive to
detailed, human-scaled acting.
This summer Hunt turned the theatre over to Sellars for the
entire summer to mount all three operas again. This meant the
company got to rehearse in the theatre for a month before
performances began; the residency in Purchase was preceded by
a month of rehearsals in Boston, where many of the singers and
musicians live. Two months of rehearsal for 15 performances of
productions that have already been rehearsed and performed in
previous years -- this is almost unheard of luxury in the
opera world, or the theatre world, for that matter.
Much has been written abut Sellars' individual Mozart
productions, especially their contemporary scenic designs:
There was The Marriage of Figaro set in the Trump
Tower, in which Basilio arrived for the wedding toting a
camcorder; Don Giovanni on a Harlem street corner, with
a Last Supper of takeout from McDonald's; and Cosi fan
tutte played out in Despina's roadside diner, with Don
Alfonso an embittered Vietnam vet and Despina impersonating,
in one scene, Shirley MacLaine. What hasn't gotten nearly as
much attention as it deserves is the special pleasure of
repertory theatergoing as it applies to Sellars' Mozart cycle,
both by itself and in the context of the PepsiCo Summerfare.
This was, after all, a rare opportunity to study a body of
work in performance, to pick out the differences and
similarities in three works that might not be discernible when
mounted separately. I had very vivid impressions from seeing
the operas before -- impressions heightened, I should add, by
the always thoughtful repertory programming at Summerfare. For
instance, during the same season that Sellars staged Cosi
fan tutte, the festival hosted Liviu Ciulei's beautiful,
bleak Guthrie Theater production of A Midsummer Night's
Dream. The resonance between the two plays, both
concerning two sets of young lovers swapping partners and
acting out fantasies in the woods, has stuck with me.
The following year, Hunt organized the entire Summerfare
around the myth of Don Juan, with six different Don Juan plays
and a Don Juan film series in addition to the Mozart opera.
Tedious as it became at times, that festival was in many ways
a fascinating pedagogical exploration of the art of
interpretation; depending on the director's vision, Don Juan
could be the embodiment of pure evil, a heroic sexual rebel, a
nationalistic symbol or a helpless product of masculine ego.
In this context, Sellars' Don Giovanni was intriguingly
perverse. Drenched with Christian symbolism (a neon cross
frequently blazed on an otherwise dimly lit Tsypin set, which
flew apart in the final scene revealing a back wall etched
with religious icons), the multiracial production featured in
the title role a young, thin, white performer whose Don Juan
was curiously, provocatively passive, as if he were merely the
will-less receptacle of the values of his drug-ridden,
criminal street milieu. It was a strange, unsettling portrayal
of one of literature's most willful characters.
When Sellars revived Don Giovanni this year, the
physical production was identical, but the cast had changed in
crucial ways that altered the interpretation entirely. Sellars
had cast as Giovanni and Leporello a pair of black twins,
Eugene and Herbert Perry. Having these strong and experienced
opera singers in the roles not only recentered the story on
the Giovanni-Leporello relationship, it sharpened the play's
moral drama and deepened Sellars' approach.
One of the problems with the director's Harlem-street-corner
Mozart was that it seemed to obliterate the class distinctions
that motivate much of Da Ponte's story; with a more forceful,
black performer in the leading role, the translation was more
clearly made from "aristocrat" to something that
made sense on the street: "gangleader" or "drug
lord." What had seemed like passivity in the earlier
production was still there in Sellars' staging -- when
Giovanni seduced the newlywed Zerlina, he sat on a doorstep
and let her come to him -- yet in Eugene Perry's performance
it came across as quiet power.
What is the power that evildoers hold over others? Why is it
that the bad guys are generally men of action, while people
who know how to do the right think talk and talk and do
nothing? These questions run through Don Giovanni, and
again and again Sellars' staging suggested intriguing
conclusions. When Leporello exchanged jackets with Giovanni,
there was no appreciable change in their appearances; it
became a gesture of servitude from Leporello, who knew full
well it would only be bad for him. Donna Anna had every reason
to hate Giovanni -- he had tried to rape her and had killed
her father -- yet she remained hooked on him, a fixation
Sellars made literal by having Anna shoot up heroin during her
aria, "Non mi dir." During all of Act 2, Giovanni's
enemies -- Ottavio, Anna, Zerlina, Masetto and Elvira -- raced
back and forth, becoming tiresome in their agonizing while
never laying hands on Giovanni. At the stunning finale, after
a little white girl has pushed Giovanni down a manhole into
hell, Sellars had the quintet sings its closing number from a
pink-lit purgatory; the rake may well have been punished, but
their fate was still to be determined.
At first, Don Giovanni seemed to have little connection
with the rest of the trilogy. Figaro and Cosi
shared many of the same performers and the tone of both
productions was set by Adrianne Lobel's trademark bright,
somewhat cartoonish sets, as opposed to Don Giovanni's
black and Asian cast and Tsypin's dark, grubby, turbulent
design. But seeing them together created strong connections
between Don Giovanni and Cosi, especially
Sellars' matter-of-fact (as opposed to melodramatic) approach
to moral issues. For instance, in his Cosi, Dorabella
and Fiordiligi saw through their lovers' disguises and
betrayed them anyway with the same clarity and sense of choice
with which Leporello served his master or Giovanni went to
hell. Considering all the deception and masqueraderie that
goes on among lovers throughout these operas, the trilogy
might well have been titled "The Game of Love."
Of the three, Figaro is the least interpreted, the
easiest to grasp, and Cosi the hardest, particularly
for someone (like myself) not schooled in opera. As an
inveterate theatregoer, my bias is toward verbal information.
I tend to apprehend the music as subsidiary, as accompaniment;
I have to force myself to consider the possibility that the
music generates what I'm seeing onstage, rather than vice
versa. It's specifically for that reason that I sometimes find
Sellars' opera stagings opaque; he is apparently communicating
with the score on a level deeper than I can perceive. The
first time I saw Cosi, I couldn't entirely understand
the seriousness with which Sellars approached it -- although
seriousness may be a strange word to attach to a production
set in a diner, where the men pop Lite beers and the women
flip through Vanity Fair.
But the second time around, at the end of an intoxicating
weekend of melodious Mozart and scrupulously staged Da Ponte,
I was looking through different eyes. I found Sellars'
sensibility at work not just when something outrageous was
going on -- someone rolling around on the floor singing in the
dark, or Despina trotting in with a word processor and running
shoes to impersonate a lawyer named Binky -- but often in
quiet, entirely musical moments. There was a lovely moment in
the first act, for example, when Fiodiligi stood at the window
of the diner shaking her head with her earrings dangling that
was cued directly to a passage of dangly-earring music in the
score. And I understood that -- like the scenic inventions and
the topical references -- much of Sellars' staging is aimed
merely at keeping the audience alert to every moment, alive in
the theatre. Good practice for being awake in the world.
American Theatre, November 1989
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