Boston Conservatory's Zack Box Theater is a classic black box. Tolerably comfortable plastic chairs face a dark, small and versatile stage for intimate theater viewing.
The shows usually performed in this type of venue are newer or lesser-known works with small casts; one would expect to see a hilarious one-man show or a playwright workshopping a one-act play. What one might not expect is opera.
Yet that is what Guerilla Opera, a professional chamber opera company in residence at Boston University, offers audiences in the Zack Box. While opera is a medium modern audiences largely view as inaccessible, Guerilla Opera brings the art form to an intimate space where it would be impossible not to connect with viewers.
"Opera is very much a product of the 19th century," said Mike Williams, the president and co-artistic director of Guerilla Opera. "What we are focusing on making here is something more accessible."
Guerilla Opera is the only company in the area whose season is comprised entirely of new, commissioned work. The experiment began very recently, with a song cycle written by Vice President and Co-Artistic Director Rudolf Rojahn in 2007. Since then, the group has put on two shows every season, tackling the daunting mission of performing only experimental premieres.
Guerilla Opera features small casts and lacks any conductor, two very unusual characteristics. The company may perform opera, but it is a far cry from one of Mozart's grand productions.
The cast size by play standards would be considered small, but by opera standards it is downright miniscule. The company's most recent production, "Say it Ain't So, Joe!," had an ensemble comprised of a mere four singers who appeared onstage with a four-piece orchestra.
"We want to present opera that is written for a modern audience," explained Williams. "We want to promote a new kind of opera that is instrumentally strong."
Hence the absence of a conductor in any of the company's productions. Williams compared leaving the conductor out of the performance to eliminating a middle man, describing the group as doing "more chamber music with singers."
While speaking with the Daily, Williams and co-founder and General Manager Aliana de la Guardia sat in the seats of the Zack Box Theater. Both had just finished a mostly sold-out run of "Say it Ain't So, Joe!," an opera centered on Sarah Palin. De la Guardia, sitting mere feet from the stage where she had portrayed Palin only minutes before, was eager to share why she has chosen to explore this project with her co-founders.
"Opera is usually so opera-singer-heavy that the instruments are often overlooked," she said while watching the technical crew strike the production's set. "We want to expose the audience to more contemporary music. Often people leave opera and are exhausted by it; we want to excite."
In addition to contemporary music, the company sometimes performs work with current themes. The Sarah Palin opera was not chosen because of the company's political positions, but rather to incorporate opera into a modern discourse.
"Say it Ain't So, Joe!" is half libretto, written by composer Curtis K. Hughes, and half taken directly from the public record. The show revisits the vice presidential debate in 2009 between then-Senator Joseph Biden and then-governor Sarah Palin. Interspersed between the debate scenes are, in the words of the composer, "brief glimpses of other contemporaneous events and political figures with some fantastical digressions."
The music plays off the natural cadences of the two candidates' actual speaking voices. The music is almost exclusively recitative, with the natural blunders in everyday speech leading the way in the music's ups and downs.
The music also cleverly complements themes in the candidate's speeches. For instance, when addressing the possibility of the president dying in office, Biden's response is backed by distinctly dirge-like instrumentation, further highlighting the back-and-forth between orchestra and singers that the company is attempting to promote.
True to Williams' vision, the instruments are indeed the centerpieces of the opera. Seated boldly onstage instead of in a pit, the orchestra is given music that is all its own, separate from the sung melodies of the singers and sometimes even responding to them.
Director Nathan Troup was not content to merely play contemporary music with present-day themes and call it new, accessible opera, though. Throughout the debate scenes, a cameraman with a hand-held camcorder films the performance as it unfolds, displaying the images being recorded on a large screen above the orchestra. This further accentuates the mix of new technology with an old art form. The technique engages a modern audience with a notoriously short attention span by presenting not only real people on stage, but also a live screening of a debate-broadcast-gone-art-film. Instead of watching images recorded on a fixed camera as during the election last year, the audience is treated to artistic close-ups of Sarah Palin's eye and clever angling that shows seven Bidens on the screen at once.
The camera work created one very interesting moment during the show when it deviated from the candidates and filmed the orchestra. Though dressed in performance blacks, the orchestra was not allowed to merely blend in with the set; the musicians were performing as well as the singers. Thus, the cameraman was interested in them as well.
One weakness was the somewhat baffling set. Covered in images of Americana, the walls were lined with faded color copies of football games or static from TV sets. In addition, upon entering the space, a stack of old TVs, some bright with static, greeted theater-goers. These representations of a slightly older America seemed at odds with both the new technology in the show and the plot's very current theme.
The debate scenes were definitely the strongest parts of the show. By taking something so familiar; in fact, it is surprising how many sound bites from the debate are easily recognizable; the composer automatically gives the audience a frame of reference and can play off the viewer's assumptions and past experiences. Every odd-numbered scene (i.e. scenes 1, 3, 5, etc.) shows an imagined Palin, Hilary Clinton or "Joe the Plumber" whose illogical rhetoric is sometimes too nonsensical to follow.
That said, there are some distinctly clever moments in the score. When de la Guardia as Palin no. 2 (the non-debate Palin) sings straight to the audience that she "is your future," she ends on a long note sung in unison with the orchestra. At one point, she stops singing, but that point is unclear, as the musicians continue to hold the note. The effect is very chilling, as she smiles before the audience is aware that she is no longer singing, and it is the orchestra that has taken the show.
"Say it Ain't So, Joe!" perfectly embodied Guerilla Opera's mission. With its small cast drawing heavily on what are becoming the company's defining characteristics, modern music and present-day theme, the show played out on stage what today's young, talented artists are trying to bring to the theater scene: something that is cutting edge that is not completely divorced from a beloved art form.
