Prototype Festival Review: Originality in Opera

The annual festival returned with an uneven slate of new works, from Huang Ruo’s oratorio ‘Angel Island’ to Heather Christian’s lively ‘Terce: A Practical Breviary.’

By 

Heidi Waleson

Jan. 16, 2024 at 5:30 pm ET

A scene from ‘Angel Island’ PHOTO: MARIA BARANOVA

New York and Brooklyn, N.Y.

At its best, the annual Prototype Festival, coproduced by Beth Morrison Projects and HERE, whose 11th iteration runs through Sunday, revels in original forms and challenging subjects. “Angel Island,”Huang Ruo’s haunting oratorio, which had its New York premiere at BAM Harvey in Brooklyn last week, fit the bill, evoking the spirits of the hundreds of thousands of Asian people who arrived at San Francisco’s Angel Island during the first decades of the 20th century. Detained under harsh conditions for months or even years, a consequence of draconian 19th-century laws restricting Asian immigration to the U.S., they carved poems into the wooden walls of the barracks. 

For a non-Chinese speaker, the poems, set in a repetitive minimalist style and performed by the Del Sol String Quartet and 12 singers from the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, had an incantatory effect. English translations in the projected supertitles—“twisting seascape,” “like a trapped pig held in a bamboo cage,” “you were buried beneath clay and earth”—were just the starting point; the hypnotic, nonlinear musical settings plumbed the authors’ despair. In the final part, as a singer struck a Chinese gong, the poem—about being deported—became a chant of futility. 

Interspersed sections—featuring two unseen narrators reading grisly, racist historical documents accompanied by quartet scherzos—were too long and lacked the musical punch of the choral movements. Matthew Ozawa’s staging was only intermittently effective. Dancers Jie-Hung Connie Shiau and Benjamin Freemantle represented a contemporary descendant of Angel Island migrants investigating the past and the unwelcoming America, respectively; the choristers, with uneven acting skills, were the detainees; and the stylized choreography by Rena Butler didn’t always connect. Bill Morrison’s flickering black-and-white film images were most striking when they aligned with the emotion of the music, such as ghostly figures superimposed on the steps of the old barracks, or the sea flowing over a rock until it disappeared. 

A scene from ‘Adoration’ PHOTO: MARIA BARANOVA

In Mary Kouyoumdjian and Royce Vavrek’s more traditional “Adoration,” which had its world premiere at the Sheen Center for Thought and Culture, a teenager uncovers a foundational lie about his family. Based on a 2008 Atom Egoyan film, the opera weaves together the imagined past, the actual past and the present. For a high-school assignment, egged on by his teacher, Simon superimposes a news story about a terrorist who hid explosives in his pregnant girlfriend’s airplane luggage on his own family tragedy: Years before, his Lebanese father (Sami) and Canadian mother (Rachel) died in a car crash. His racist grandfather (Morris) insisted that Sami crashed the car on purpose. 

The unwieldy journey to the truth involves commenters in cyberspace, Simon’s uncle Tom, and his teacher Sabine, whose motivations are more than meets the eye. Yet Ms. Kouyoumdjian’s music was slow and deliberate throughout the opera’s 90 minutes, reflecting the dreamy process of exploration but missing any dramatic spark of suspense or revelation. Mr. Vavrek’s overly detailed libretto, set for intelligibility, had the upper hand, and the solution to the mystery proved as unsavory as the original lie. 

Miriam Khalil, a big-voiced soprano, shone as the enigmatic Sabine and got the most elaborate vocal writing; Marc Kudisch brought a tough forthrightness to Morris; Omar Najmi embodied Simon’s adolescent confusion; Karim Sulayman’s sweet tenor belied the calumnies heaped on Sami; Naomi Louisa O’Connell and David Adam Moore were solid as Rachel and Tom. Music director Alan Piersonbalanced a live string quartet, electronic processing, and a recorded murmuring choir. Director Laine Rettmer made clever use of live and pre-recorded video and a simple revolving set by Afsoon Pajoufar to switch between time periods. 

“Chornobyldorf,” given its U.S. premiere at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, is described by its Ukrainian composer/directors Roman Grygoriv and Illia Razumeikoas an “archeological opera in seven novels.” It is an imagined post-apocalyptic excavation of the people and culture of Chernobyl, the city famous for the nuclear-reactor disaster of 1986. Fragments of the past were assembled into seven narrative sections, some clearer than others, with 13 performers and video by Dmytro Tentiuk. Orchestral and folk instruments such as the dulcimer and bandura, an elaborate percussion setup, and electronics were massaged into effusions that regularly headed into earsplitting territory (earplugs were distributed at the door, always a bad sign). Singers switched from the nasal, dissonant harmonies of Eastern European folk music to a Bach Mass and a round adapted from a Mahler symphony. The dancers were mostly semi- and sometimes entirely naked. There were striking moments, but not enough of them to enliven the intermissionless 135 minutes. 

Wende, the composer and performer of the song cycle “The Promise,” given at HERE, is a charismatic artist with a broad vocal and expressive range and a winning personality. Her material, co-composed by Isobel Waller-Bridge, wasn’t always as good. The songs, which plumbed the dark places of a woman’s soul, included an exploration of life as a horror movie and a heartfelt renunciation of motherhood. They ranged from snarly rap to intimate ballads, and finally emerged into hope with the repeated line “It’s not light yet, but it’s getting there.” 

Also brimming with full-on female energy, the shortest and liveliest Prototype show was “Terce: A Practical Breviary,” an hourlong riff on the Medieval 9 a.m. breviary Mass addressing the Holy Spirit, in this case the Divine Feminine. Created and led by Heather Christian, and performed by 38 singing, dancing and instrument-playing women wearing creatively embellished and distressed choir robes, it was a jubilant community celebration of female work, striving, disappointment and devotion. To be part of the audience, arrayed in an intimate circle around the performers in Brooklyn’s Space at Irondale, felt like being invited to join the coolest convent ever.

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).