‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Review: A Visit to Dystopia
Boston Lyric Opera’s staging of Poul Ruders’s operatic adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel gives the audience an up-close view of a horrifying near-future.
Caroline Worra as Aunt Lydia (center) in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Photo: Liza Voll By Heidi Waleson May 7, 2019 2:46 p.m. ET
Boston
In the last two years, a television adaptation of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Margaret Atwood’s dystopian 1985 novel, has pushed the story to the forefront of the present-day zeitgeist. Women wearing Handmaids’ red dresses and white winged caps have become emblems of #MeToo protests, a visual reminder of the novel’s depiction of the sexual subjugation and silencing of women. Now, Boston Lyric Opera has mounted Poul Ruders’s gripping stage version, which had its world premiere in Copenhagen in 2000 and its only U.S. production at the Minnesota Opera in 2003. The score has lost none of its ferocious impact, and BLO’s ingenious, immersive staging in a Harvard basketball arena ensures that the audience cannot escape its message.
Paul Bentley’s deft libretto follows the novel closely. “The Handmaid’s Tale” is set in the not-to-distant future, when America has been violently transformed into a theocracy, the Republic of Gilead, with women relegated to second-class status, forbidden to hold jobs, have money, read or write. Ecological devastation and pollution have produced rampant infertility, so women who had children in the “Time Before” are allotted to high-ranking men (Commanders) and their wives to serve as reproductive vessels. These Handmaids are strictly policed and deprived of all agency, including their names. The heroine is called only Offred (“of Fred”); her struggle is to remember the past (the opera skillfully interpolates Time Before scenes), particularly the child who was taken from her, and to try both to survive and to hope for some alternative future. It won’t be easy: The rules are rigid, and punishment is extreme.
Chelsea Basler as Moira and Jennifer Johnson Cano as Offred Photo: Liza Voll
The large, noisy orchestra and the swift pace of the opera’s three dozen scenes, many of them fleeting, create the almost unrelenting stress and disturbing atmosphere of this environment for the characters and the audience alike. A new edition of the score has slightly reduced the size of the orchestra to 62 players, making for a better balance with the voices without any diminution in impact. BLO also wisely eliminated a pair of framing “symposium” scenes. The opera is now focused squarely on Offred, sung with passionate intensity by the rich-voiced mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano, a consummate actress, who is onstage throughout. She is the only character who has arias, well-crafted mediations that take us into Offred’s mind and feelings, in contrast to the ritual phrases (“May the Lord open;” “Under His Eye”) that make up her daily interactions.
Aunt Lydia, trainer and enforcer of the Handmaids, personifies Gilead’s oppressiveness. Soprano Caroline Worra played her with ramrod demeanor, and made her vocal character—high, steely, with upward leaps—reflect her sadistic pleasure in wielding power as much as her olive uniform, helmet-like hairdo, and cattle prod did. The other excellent singers were precise in their supporting roles: Maria Zifchak exuded resentment as the Commander’s wife, Serena Joy, a silenced gospel singer, whose former trademark song, “Amazing Grace” is malevolently twisted and darkened in the orchestration. Kathryn Skemp Moran brought a piercing brightness to the broken Janine, who thinks she is still a waitress; as tougher women, Michelle Trainor (Ofglen) and Chelsea Basler (Moira) each had her own take on resistance. Felicia Gavilanes brought a poignant innocence to Offred in the Time Before. Matthew Dibattista made the most of his cameo as the sleazy gynecologist who offers, with a bit of tenor falsetto, to impregnate Offred; as the Commander, David Cushing used his sonorous bass-baritone to evoke both patriarchal privilege and uncertainty. The chorus of Handmaids, singing Bible texts in chorales, became the brainwashed majority. Conductor David Angus led a taut, balanced performance.
Director Anne Bogart, aided by movement director Shura Baryshnikov, cannily zeroed in on the group rituals of Handmaid life in Gilead, which included processions, practicing for childbirth, attending at a birth, and executing transgressors. Designer James Schuette created a simple cinderblock and neon-lined well at the center of the basketball arena. A few bits of furniture—Offred’s bed, the Commander’s table, a shop sign—were quickly whisked in and out as necessary. Costume colors established everybody’s status in the hierarchy and video designer Adam J. Thompson supplied the creepy images of the executed hanging on the Wall, a menacing symbol of the consequences of disobedience, which the Handmaids visit regularly. Brian Scott’s lighting segued between the chill of the present and the warmth of memory.
The space required some sound enhancement for balance and J Jumbelic’s artful sound design kept the voices, for the most part, sounding natural. Whatever the trade off, the immediacy of the experience in this unconventional space, with the audience on bleachers on three sides and the orchestra behind the singers instead of in a pit, was worth it. The opera was powerful on a proscenium stage; here, its horror reached out and grabbed you.
—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).
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