(We Know) Who Killed This Woman's Lover

Opera is dead (undeniably). Operatic institutions are dinosaurs edging toward extinction (if not already on life-support). Operas make for the least compelling of theatrical experiences (let alone compelling musical ones). But every so often a production comes along that says to us nay-sayers that opera is every bit as exciting, and transfixing and terribly moving as the very best that the Harry Potter franchise has to offer; that it is truly an art form that overwhelms by the perfect collaboration between so many art forms. Such a production has come and if you're as lucky as I am to be in New York at this very moment, you simply must MUST go to the New York City Opera's Monodramas, a performance of three one-woman scenes, written by John Zorn, Arnold Schoenberg and Morton Feldman (sung passionately, brilliantly and close to flawlessly by Anu Komsi, Cyndia Sieden and Kara Shay Thomson).

Admittedly, three one-woman scenes do not an opera make. And each scene revels in its own intense interiority, so much so that narratives have to give way to the conceptual. Zorn's opera is textless, and Feldman's Woman (just like Schoenberg's and Zorn's protagonist, they are all nameless) sings in such an impossibly high register (you HAVE to hear Cyndia Sieden to believe it) that it becomes no different than Zorn's textless vocalise. So what are we left with, with so much taken away? Conceptual, textless monologues with nameless heroines: if this is opera, it is because opera, as noun, de-territorialized is opera, as genre, re-territorialized.

Tommasini's review in the Times could and SHOULD have gushed a whole lot more. Don't get me wrong, his review was enthusiastic but it misses aspects of the production that I think are simply brilliant. It overlooked, especially, the breathtaking re-vision, by director and set designer Michael Counts, of Schoenberg's Erwartung, conceived, in this production, in the tradition of Francois Ozon's 5x2, and Jason Robert Brown's The Last 5 Years, and Christopher Nolan's Momento and Gaspard Noe's Irreversible, as a scene that presents itself in reverse chronology, that runs itself backwards in time: so that we begin at the end and we end at the beginning. So, for Tommasini, what happens to the Woman's lover remains an enigma: "... did he wander off and get killed? Did the crazed woman kill him in vengeance? Did any of this happen?", when in fact, Counts shows us exactly what happens, that it was indeed the Woman who plunged the knife into the man's heart because we see her taking the knife OUT of his chest; her lover does not rise from the dead to dance with her, but he is in fact coming back to life because we have reached the point in the story BEFORE his murder; and the "silent sisterly characters" are no ghosts who follow and tend to the Woman, but are aspects of her dissociated personality that re-merge (my jaw DROPPED at the way this scene was staged) with her near the end of the scene when we arrive at the point in time before her psyche's fracture.

Schoenberg described Erwartung as a way of representing " ... in slow motion everything that occurs during a single second of maximum spiritual excitement, stretching it out to half an hour." Counts understands slow motion in a genuinely filmic way: his use of reverse chronology forces us to understand Erwartung not as simply the aftermath of a murder and a woman's descent into guilt-ridden madness, but to see the idea of expectation as an irreversible aspect of a woman's fate. An ordinary chronology would be mere moralizing, that madness is the payoff for her crime. By placing the fracture at the beginning, the scene's climax is a woman standing on the edge of sanity: we sympathize with her because we understand (and have already seen) her horrible, inescapable fate.