Listen to the chirps of cicadas long enough, and you might begin to impose your own music onto theirs, infusing it with the mysterious rhythm of the day’s feelings. The sounds of nature may have nothing to do with our struggles, but for those in the midst of human conflict, they become a soundtrack to our thoughts and feelings, reflecting how we make the natural world part of our inner struggles.
Paola Prestini’s first full-length opera at National Sawdust begins and ends with a chorus of cicadas; the rhythms of the natural world and of daily life guide it and frame seas of emotion buried beneath an otherwise peaceful exterior. Based on Carlos Reygadas’ film of the same name, Silent Light is a portrait of a Mennonite marriage at a breaking point. Johan, middle-aged and otherwise dutiful, has been having an affair with another woman, Marianne. He wants to stop, but his connection with Marianne is only slightly stronger than his guilt. His wife Esther knows it all and watches in quiet desperation and suppressed anger. Johan’s pull toward both women and the inevitable choice he feels he must make between them brings all three characters to surprising places. The opera ends with a mysterious resurrection that, instead of resolving the tension, restores and enshrines it.
The characters live in an isolated community, one whose emotional language is constrained, appearing almost alien to talkative, therapized outsiders. Vavrek’s libretto is appropriately spare, but he was clearly struck by a line from the film. Johan wants to stop the clock, to keep both women in his life. It is Marianne who tells him: “That is the one thing we cannot do.” This line frames the opera, but the final moments leave the truth of Marianne’s words in question. The clock does turn back, though perhaps not for Johan’s sake.
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Reygadas’ film presents a typical melodramatic situation but, by dint of his setting and characters, asks a fascinating question: what is a melodrama without expressiveness? Without explosive conflicts or, indeed, much speech, his Silent Light forces the passions of the characters underneath the surface, diffusing them into the actors’ bodies and then out into the landscape itself. The lack of hyperbole seems antithetical to opera’s typical rhythms, but Prestini and librettist Royce Vavrek embrace the challenge offered by their source material. Furthermore, Prestini builds on Reygadas’ work to ask another intriguing question: what is opera when the voice is no longer the most important instrument but only one within a larger landscape of sounds?
Long before we hear a note of music, we hear the sounds of daily life: first there is a chorus of cicadas that surrounds the audience. Then we hear bowls clacking on tables, milk pouring into a glass, and quiet chatter as women divide up the tasks of breakfast. The opera relies heavily on live foley work, designed by Sxip Shirey and performed by Nathan Repesz. These sounds are as essential to Silent Lights’ sonic landscape as the chamber orchestra. But even these sounds are nestled in context with other senses: We even smell bacon frying as actors cook on a functioning stove and watch as they eat scrambled eggs and pancakes. Later, an acrid metallic smoke fills the air in a scene in a mechanic’s workshop that blurs the audience’s vision as well as invades their noses.
Director and designer Thaddeus Strassberger puts National Sawdust’s intimate (read: tight) space through its paces with a handsome, striking set constructed almost entirely of unfinished plywood, from floor to walls to furniture. A raised platform disguises a pool of water, whose reflections splash onto the wooden wall upstage. More than one actor gets completely drenched in this pool or from falling rain. Elliptically plotted and directed, this opera leaves much unsaid and much unseen; plenty of moments indicated in the program simply don’t happen onstage. By turns, this is both fascinating and frustrating; it places much of the dramatic exposition in the program and occasionally robs the actors of the chance to do more than gaze intently.
As Johan, baritone Daniel Okulitch, carried his guilt and love with a visceral heaviness in his tall frame but sang with a well-honed ease. Julia Mintzer delivered an intense performance, her elegant, expressive face letting us into the tides of emotion held within Marianne’s watchful eyes and her dark, seductive mezzo-soprano caressing each word. Brittney Renee as Esther was mesmerizing, with a present, powerful soprano sound. Neither Johan nor the audience could hide from her gaze, which judged, pleaded, lamented, and loved with all the many rich veins of emotion that lie under the foundations of a marriage. Margaret Lattimore, as Esther’s long-suffering mother, struck a powerful note, her disgust with Johan balanced by a palpable love for her daughter. Anthony Dean Griffey, as one of Johan’s confidants, had a strong, brassy sound as metallic as the welding gear we meet him in.
Prestini’s score moves seamlessly between environmental sound and music, combining some jazz and country influences with an otherwise highly contemporary musical language. NOVUS ensemble, here directed by an energetic Christopher Rountree. Some of it is very successful; a sexy, sinister number dominated by grooving drums and trombone was both surprising and memorable. Her chorus work is highly compelling; Silent Light was written in part with Trinity Church Choir, who sang with crisp, clear expression. Prestini’s writing is strongest with them; at various points, contemporary harmonies meet hymns in beautiful, surprising ways. These moments let the chorus take on the unsaid passions of the principal characters. At other moments, however, I longed for more variety in the vocal lines, which featured a lot of repetitive declamation, and more sensitivity in the orchestral parts. At its worst, the score worked to flatten, instead of expand, the emotional palette of opera and made the more familiar melodramatic elements of its structure feel less than fresh. As an operatic experiment, however, Silent Light fascinates with slow, unique rhythms all its own.