This year’s edition of the adventurous showcase includes an intimate double bill by Irish composer Emma O’Halloran and a dazzling, uncategorizable work by Gelsey Bell that spans geologic time
A scene from ‘Morning//Mourning’
PHOTO: MARIA BARANOVA
By Heidi Waleson
Jan. 10, 2023 7:18 pm ET
With the 10th anniversary season of the Prototype Festival under way, it’s hard to imagine artistic life without this annual January showcase for adventurous opera/music theater. Launched in 2013, this collaboration between Beth Morrison Projects and HERE has given a wide range of young composers a New York stage on which to experiment with subjects and forms. Over the years, Prototype has birthed two Pulitzer winners (Du Yun’s “Angel’s Bone” and Ellen Reid’s “p r i s m”), welcomed unusual European fare like the choral “Toxic Psalms” and the savage “4:48 Psychosis,” and presented breakthrough works like David T. Little’s “Dog Days,” David Lang’s “anatomy theater,” Missy Mazzoli’s “Breaking the Waves” and Gregory Spears’s “Fellow Travelers.” Forced into the digital sphere by the pandemic in 2021, Prototype came up with the ingenious multicomposer work “Modulation”; and although the live 2022 festival was canceled at the last minute due to a resurgence of the virus, the producers got Taylor Mac’s “The Hang” and Huang Ruo’s “Book of Mountains and Seas,” both gems, onstage.
This year, one of Prototype’s discoveries is the Irish composer Emma O’Halloran, whose double bill “Trade/Mary Motorhead” had its world premiere on Saturday at the Abrons Arts Center. Ms. O’Halloran’s distinctive musical style meshes acoustic and electronic sound in a way that makes it hard to separate one from the other. The effect—brutal and gentle by turns—suited her subject matter, two short plays by her uncle Mark O’Halloran that explore the inner lives of some damaged, frustrated people.
Naomi Louisa O’Connell as the title character in ‘Mary Motorhead’PHOTO: MARIA BARANOVA
Mary Motorhead (Naomi Louisa O’Connell) is serving an 18-year prison sentence for murdering her husband; in “Trade,” the Older Man (Marc Kudisch) and the Younger Man (Kyle Bielfield), both of whom are in heterosexual relationships, meet for paid sex. All are Irish working class, and one gathers from their halting speech that they are unused to articulating their feelings. Yet Ms. O’Halloran’s vocal settings, and especially her orchestral accompaniments, help push those feelings to the surface in all their awkwardness. It’s 21st-century verismo, using psychological revelations instead of physical violence as dramatic catalysts.
“Mary Motorhead,” a 30-minute monologue, is the slighter piece, and Ms. O’Connell, with her rich mezzo, seemed a bit too polished for the tough young woman whose desperate need for connection is expressed as anger: She explains that she stabbed her husband in the head “to see if he’s in there.” Unlike Italian verismo, the musical setting doesn’t afford the listener distance from the stark rawness of emotions and deeds. Rather, the rock ’n’ roll thrust of the electronics pushes the story’s sense of brutal inevitability.
“Trade,” twice as long, delves deeper into the inner lives of the two men, their feelings about being both fathers and sons, and for each other. In their slow, uncomfortable process of self-explanation, fueled by many cans of “shite” beer, Ms. O’Halloran’s music fills in the blanks, finding both the brittle aggressiveness of the Younger Man, who discovered at age 14 that he could make easy money having sex with “auld fellers,” and the tentative but luminous tenderness that the Older Man feels for him. Skillfully directed by Tom Creed, Mr. Bielfield’s haunting tenor created an enormously poignant character, his monosyllabic profanity just a cover for his terror, while Mr. Kudisch’s slow burn gradually revealed a superficially macho man longing to be understood.
Marc Kudisch and Kyle Bielfield in ‘Trade’
PHOTO: MARIA BARANOVA
Jim Findlay’s simple sets—a wall with a central door that never opens for “Mary,” a faceless room with only a bed and chair for “Trade”—acted as canvases for Christopher Kuhl’s lighting: a violent spotlight for “Mary”; giant shadows and pastel colors in “Trade.” Montana Levi Blanco did the evocative costumes, though one wondered why Mary got to wear goth gear in prison. In the pit, NOVUS NY, conducted by Elaine Kelly, created a vivacious sound world.
“Morning//Mourning,” which had its premiere on Friday at HERE, exemplifies what makes Prototype essential: It’s a home for the uncategorizable. This alluring work by the polymath artist Gelsey Bell—she wrote the music and the libretto, served as music director, and created the arrangements in association with her four singer/player fellow performers—is a 90-minute meditation on what would happen if humans suddenly disappeared from Earth. Part scientific exposition, part imaginative flight of fancy, “Morning//Mourning” plays with time, flipping our knowledge of geologic eras into the future, beginning with tiny spans—“Within the first hours”—and ending with vast ones, “At 42 million years.”
The musical flow sweeps the listener into those stretches of time, whether it’s a haunting, five-voice canon about bristlecone pines on a windy ridge (5,000 years); a joyous explosion of bells, xylophone and harp as new life forms begin their journey at 241,000 years; or a sweet, accordion-accompanied reminiscence about odd things that humans did. Sonorities can be unexpected. Ms. Bell and her fellow performers—Ashley Pérez Flanagan, Justin Hicks, Aviva Jaye and Paul Pinto—play a variety of acoustic and electronic instruments, and vocalize in speech, syllabic noises, ululations, choral settings, and the occasional operatic flight. The text, set clearly and evocatively, has plenty of wit: Listeners can track the evolution of a new intelligent species, the Blooklungs, from their origin as octopuses making their way onto land into beings capable of traveling into outer space and living there.
The message is serious, but not tragic. One late section is titled “Nothing Lasts Forever,” and at 1.6 billion years the last bacteria on Earth die. The wordless “Mourning,” which begins the piece, is a short-term affair; “Morning,” which ends it, suggests the infinite possibilities of galactic time and space.
Simply and powerfully staged by Tara Ahmadinejad, with scenic design by Afsoon Pajoufar and lighting by Masha Tsimring in a semicircular space, the five storytellers move among the sculpted stations that hold their instruments. Marbles, symbolizing years, are added to a bowl at the center; in one long section, played in an almost complete blackout, the performers face upstage, watching lanterns behind a scrim blink on and off. The piece could be trimmed slightly, but overall, its clarity accentuates its emotional impact.
A scene from ‘Undine’
PHOTO: UNDINE TEAM
The same cannot be said for “Undine,” a 30-minute animated opera film, with music by Stefanie Janssen, Michaël Brijs and Richard van Kruysdijk and directed by Sjaron Minailo, available as a stream for free. It’s the story of a mermaid addicted to plastic who interferes with the lives of three humans, but the piece is bewildering unless you read the synopsis first, and even then. Ms. Janssen’s high vocals are intriguing, as is the visual depiction of the multi-tentacled mermaid, but the anti-plastic message went over my head. Still, that’s the beauty of Prototype—it takes opera experimentation seriously, even if not every experiment is a success.
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).
Appeared in the January 11, 2023, print
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