To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy Center and the 10th anniversary of the American Opera Initiative, monument-inspired premieres from diverse creators
By Heidi Waleson
March 8, 2022 6:51 pm ET
Washington
Operas written for special occasions have a long history—for example, the many French Baroque pieces created for coronations and weddings. “Written in Stone,” which had its premiere by the Washington National Opera on Saturday, commemorates both the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy Center, WNO’s home, and the 10th anniversary of the American Opera Initiative, the company’s fruitful new-works development program. The project deftly combines the two, casting the Kennedy Center as a “living monument” and a diverse group of living creators as the appropriate people to explore the idea that monuments are more than cold stone.
The brief curtain raiser, the solo piece “Chantal” by Jason Moran and Alicia Hall Moran, calls the very permanence of monuments into question. Ms. Moran, a potent mezzo, plays a surveyor who declares, “You know I know you’re leaning” and suggests that some monuments have outlived their time. “Rise” by Kamala Sankaram and A.M. Homes and “it all falls down” by Carlos Simon and Marc Bamuthi Joseph use the monument theme to make statements about changing times: the first regarding the role of women in civil society, the second about homosexuality. Finally, “The Rift” by Huang Ruo and David Henry Hwang looks at the divisions in American society through the story of the creation of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
“Rise” starts out playfully, its jaunty orchestration depicting Alicia (Vanessa Becerra), a Latina Girl Scout lost in the Capitol and desperate for a bathroom. She encounters a Powerful Woman ( Daryl Freedman, whose mezzo voice indeed powerful); the comic byplay about how long it took to get a convenient women’s rest room in this male bastion serves as a slightly awkward metaphor for the larger issue. The rest of the piece, featuring J’nai Bridges as a Black Capitol police officer, revolves around the Portrait Monument, Adelaide Johnson’s massive sculpture depicting Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, which was presented to Congress in 1921 in celebration of women winning the right to vote, and then ignominiously consigned to the Capitol crypt until 1997. We learn that part of the monument is rough and uncarved, emblematic of the struggle that continues. The opera is educational, if a bit didactic, and the final burst of inspiration—“Rise and add your name”—is appropriately fervent.
“it all falls down” is tighter and more character-based, built on the conflict between Mtchll, a pastor, and Bklyn, his son and successor, over the revelation that Bklyn is gay, and the efforts of their wife/mother, Laurel, to bring them together. The ostensible monument here is the Supreme Court, and its 2015 decision recognizing same-sex marriage, but the real monument at issue is the Black church, and whether it can accommodate such a challenge to its traditional values.
Church cadences of preaching and congregational response infuse the score; the chorus parts supply the sense of community and familial strength, even as the three central characters enact a struggle that could pull it apart at the seams. As Laurel, Ms. Bridges had more opportunity to shine than she did in “Rise,” her voluptuous soprano soaring in the peacemaker’s role. Bass-baritone Alfred Walker and tenor Christian Mark Gibbs brought vocal heft and theatrical intensity to father and son. In the final scene, the chorus sings text from the 2015 decision, as if approving of it, yet James Robinson’s directing astutely leaves open the question of whether Mtchll will agree to the premise of “Love over rules” and accept his son as he is.
“The Rift,” the longest and most substantial work in the evening, recalls the conflicts over the creation of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which, from the time it was authorized in 1980, revived the pain of a deeply unpopular and divisive war. Four excellent singers play multiple characters, including Maya Lin ( Karen Vuong ), the Yale undergraduate who submitted the winning design (out of 1,421) to the blind competition, and Robert McNamara ( Rod Gilfry ), the defense secretary whose role in escalating U.S. involvement in Vietnam made his name synonymous with its disastrous progress and outcome. The opera opens with a rhythmic, repeated, two-note motif, emblematic of the rift itself; then brief but potent scenes, each one musically distinctive, look at all the angles. In one, detractors squabble in a spoken melee (“No memorial for baby-killers!”); in the next, Maya Lin passionately describes her project, “It appears as a rift in the earth.” The aria, in which Mr. Hwang artfully mingles his own words and Ms. Lin’s, becomes an eloquent vision of catharsis and finally, healing.
Healing takes some time. We get McNamara’s self-exculpatory, yet not unsympathetic, musings, and vicious attacks on the design and the designer ( Ross Perot’s description is “some ugly black slab designed by an egg roll”). Grady Mitchell (Mr. Gibbs), a veteran with traumatic memories, and Phuong Tran ( Nina Yoshida Nelsen ), a refugee whose dead husband, a South Vietnamese soldier, will not have his name on the memorial, think it’s meaningless. But, young as she is, Maya Lin stands up for her design and her Asian heritage; Mitchell, Tran and McNamara visit the memorial and find some solace there as the two-note motif reappears. The opera ends with it resolved in a chord.
Robert Spano led the capable WNO Orchestra, which was behind a scrim on the Eisenhower Theater stage. Erhard Rom designed the blocky, no-frills set, leaving it to S. Katy Tucker’s black-and-white projections to provide salient details—the Portrait Monument; the church’s stained-glass windows, the helicopters over the rice paddies. Dede Ayite designed the costumes (the outfits of the congregation in “it all falls down” were the liveliest) and Mark McCullough did the lighting. Ms. Moran did her own blocking for “Chantal”; Mr. Robinson’s direction of the other three pieces was efficient if broad-stroked.
“Written in Stone” proved an ambitious and thoughtful way to mark two significant anniversaries, and to make the point, through all of these different voices, that the work is never done.
—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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