Opera is officially the Debby Downer of the theater industry. Actually, it's more like the bastard lovechild of Debby Downer and Jack Kevorkian.
It's sad. It's sadistic. But it's brilliant, and the reason is this: of all the forms of live entertainment, opera reaches the highest pitch of emotion, and it finds the truest - and sometimes darkest - corners of humanity.
In many ways, opera is often expected to end here, and that's fine. Opera is, in its essence, a vehicle to express what cannot be said and what can only be felt. But Gian Carlo Menotti's "The Consul" achieves more. His Pulitzer-prize winning work, staged by Opera Boston at the Cutler Majestic Theater, conveys absolute tragedy, but also surprisingly and convincingly it also demonstrates the necessity of having aspirations.
"The Consul" is set in an unnamed and oppressive country, but one can assume that it represents the totalitarian regimes throughout Europe in the mid-20th century. Solemn and powerful freedom fighter John Sorel (Anton Belov) is on the run from the secret police. His only chance to live is to immediately flee his own country, leaving behind his wife, baby and mother.
Before leaving, John instructs his wife, Magda (Joanna Porackava), to go to the other country's consulate to acquire a visa. Unfortunately, because Magda is not a citizen, she cannot get the necessary paperwork, and despite her dying baby and sick mother, the cold, bureaucratic consulate is unmoved.
It is here that Menotti demonstrates the tension between human passion and human indifference. The consulate itself is eerily reminiscent of the DMV - there are long lines, unhappy faces, and behind the desk is a lifeless, exacting secretary. Magda pleads desperately with the consulate secretary (Mary Ann Stuart), but this Nurse Rachet-type bureaucrat, who hardly looks up from her domineeringly tall desk, says simply, "Your name is a number, your story a case, your need a request." The paradox of this secretary is that she essentially represents the "freer" of the two countries and the less oppressive of the two governments.
In many ways, Menotti's play, written in 1950, is a postmodern look at human toil and frustration. Magda wants nothing more than to love her husband and care for her family, but arbitrary and incidental borders - not greed, hatred or jealousy - are what shatter her dreams. She is therefore left lost, a foreigner in her own country.
Menotti highlights this loss of place and self with a collection of dream sequences that point out the absurdity of trying to govern human interaction. At one point, a magician (Frank Kelley), also seeking a visa at the consulate, hypnotizes everyone in the room in an attempt to prove his identity. As the hopeful emigrants comically waltz around the consulate waiting room, the secretary yells "Stop, this is no way to act in a consulate!" - as though artificial happiness is any less noble than actual depravity.
Again and again, the secretary tells Magda she cannot get a visa and can certainly not see the consul. Eventually, after slowly worsening in condition, Magda's baby dies, as does Magda's mother. All she has left in her life is her husband - she hopes - and the consulate that separates them.
Within all of this, Menotti somehow injects a palpable sense of optimism. At the peak of her frustration (and at the crescendo of the opera), Magda cries out, "One day neither ink nor seal will cage us," referring to the insufferable and tragic bureaucracy of the embassy. What's surprising is that such determination and hope still exist within Magda, but what's shocking is that it has an effect.
After hearing her plea, the once-Draconian secretary finally allows Magda to see the consul. But, of course, this is just a glimpse of hope. In Menotti's demonstration of situational irony, the audience must watch in agony as Magda excitedly prepares to meet the consul, unaware that a government agent (who had tailed her to the embassy) is speaking to the consul right now, explaining Magda's and John's situation. Magda is ignorant of this fact until she sees the agent (Daniel Cole) and realizes there is no hope.
Magda's ensuing suicide presents a thought-provoking episode. Ironically, the consulate secretary calls Magda to warn her that the government agent is coming to her house to arrest her as she is sticking her head in a gas oven. Too asphyxiated to answer the phone, she never hears the warning.
Even if Magda had answered the phone there would still have been no escape; either way, she would have died. The masterful Menotti, one must assume, made no mistake here. For many people in the world, he suggests, life is without better options but not necessarily without hope.
