A woman’s broken relationship with her Pentecostal snake-handling father; revisiting family letters from a victim of the Holocaust.

The cast of ‘Taking Up Serpents’ Photo: Scott Suchman 0 Comments By Heidi Waleson Jan. 15, 2019 12:41 p.m. ET

Washington

Washington National Opera has taken a practical approach to the creation of new work with its American Opera Initiative, now in its seventh season. Every year, WNO commissions four chamber-scaled operas—one hourlong work and three 20-minute ones—workshops them, and gives them world premieres in modest productions in the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater, using the talents of the singers from its young artists program. Recent projects have traveled successfully: Just last year, Missy Mazzoli’s “Proving Up” went to Opera Omaha and Miller Theater in New York, and a new, expanded version of Huang Ruo’s “An American Soldier” (2014) was presented at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis.

This year’s hourlong opera, Kamala Sankaram’s intriguing “Taking Up Serpents,” which opened on Friday, also merits a wider audience. Like the composer’s “Thumbprint” (2014), it deals with a woman’s escape from a patriarchal background, this time, a Pentecostal snake-handling church in the American South. Jerre Dye’s compact libretto neatly telescopes the story and explores the primal association between snakes and fear while leaving space for us to get to know the principal characters through Ms. Sankaram’s skillful, passionate vocal writing. There is Kayla, who has left home but can’t rid herself of the toxic remnants of her once-worshipful relationship with her snake-handler preacher father, and Nelda, her mother, whose faith is tried in a different way. How do modern women survive being told that they are weak, cursed and “made for sin”?

That question becomes central when the father, known only as Daddy, is dying after being bitten by one of his snakes. Nelda, against his wishes, has hospitalized him and summoned Kayla home. Ms. Sankaram’s music deftly limns Kayla’s limbo state (she works in a mini-mart and is full of longing) as well as her growing anger; for example, the flute that flutters tentatively around her vocal line at the beginning becomes an insistent presence as she finds her courage. It also ingeniously depicts her environment with choral writing inspired by the raw contours of shape-note singing, deployed both in the church and on a midnight bus ride full of lost people.

Alexandria Shiner was an affecting Kayla, her powerful soprano gaining strength and security along with her character. Mezzo Eliza Bonet brought a fierce energy to the conflicted Nelda, and bass Timothy J. Bruno was persuasive as Daddy, whose overbearing sense of entitlement suffused the two dramatic flashback scenes. Conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya ably shaped the score: Its spare orchestration is built on string drones and slithering glissandos and colored with punchy special effects, such as the whirly tubes that make a soft, creepy hooting sound, associated with Kayla’s memories, and the glockenspiel that plays as her father brands her as a sinful daughter of Eve and that later accompanies her triumphant assertion, “I am the light.” Director Alison Moritz focused the action and made the most of the simple set—stacks of plastic crates, a hospital bed, a lighted cross. It would be interesting to see this piece in a fuller production.

***

Jessica Tyler Wright and Brian James Myer in ‘Dear Erich’ Photo: Sarah Shatz

New York

A Holocaust-themed jazz opera seems like an unlikely combination, and so it proved with Ted Rosenthal’s “Dear Erich,” given its world premiere by the New York City Opera in collaboration with the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene at the Museum of Jewish Heritage last week. Mr. Rosenthal is a jazz pianist and composer; this opera, his first, was sparked by the discovery of 200 letters written between 1938 and 1941 by his grandmother, Herta, to his father, Erich, who left Germany to study at the University of Chicago. That’s powerful raw material, but neither the cliché-ridden libretto (by the composer and Lesley Rosenthal, his wife) nor the bland soft-jazz score evokes much emotional resonance.

The story is anchored in the present, with Old Erich’s adult son, Freddy, learning about the family history that his father never talked about and whose absence has left a gulf between them. There are flashbacks to Germany and Young Erich’s new life and love in Chicago, along with the letters that connect those two worlds. The opera’s best scene depicts the desperate, separate, efforts of Young Erich and Herta to get Herta a visa to come to America; with its background drumbeat and quick alternations of narrative, it captures the urgency of the situation. That is the real core of the story: Herta never gets a visa, the letters stop, and her son knows nothing of her fate. It is Freddy (in the present) who finds out that she died in the Sobibór extermination camp.

The opera could have used more of that urgency. Instead, there are lengthy, repetitive arias crammed with pointless rhymes (“So many flames, so many pyres, so many blazing heavenly choirs”) and trite lines (“The darkness comes before the morning”). The tunes, written to be pretty, are interchangeable, though Old Erich’s nurse, Carmelita, gets a Latin rhythm for her number, a heavy-handed signifier of her ethnicity. (The aria, about why immigrant parents don’t tell their children the truth about the past, is more of a device than an organic development, as is the scene in which present-day German thugs menace a Muslim woman.) The music never explores the pain of Old Erich’s survivor guilt, and the tidy conclusion, with the present-day family reconciled and a final, full-cast chorus opining about the importance of remembering, feels entirely predictable.

The no-frills production (a couple of fabric panels with facsimiles of the letters on them, a few chairs and table, off-the-rack costumes, and no lighting to speak of), minimally directed by Mikhaela Mahony, didn’t help. The cast was adequate: Notable were baritone Brian James Myer, who brought some vocal depth to Young Erich, and the rich mezzo sound of Sishel Claverie as Carmelita. Adam Glaser led the 11-member orchestra; the jazz trio at its center got its chance to swing in the extended instrumental sections.

—Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).