‘Ruinous Gods’ struggles to find musical or narrative coherence in its depiction of the toll forced migration takes on children; Denis O’Hare and Lisa Peterson’s ‘The Song of Rome’ offers a sophisticated modern spin on Virgil’s ‘Aeneid.
By Heidi Waleson
Karim Sulayman
PHOTO: WILLIAM STRUHS
Charleston, S.C.
In the past, Spoleto Festival USA mounted several opera-related projects each spring; this year the Festival, which is now headed by Mena Mark Hanna, has only one: the world premiere of “Ruinous Gods” by composer Layale Chakerand librettist Lisa Schlesinger. Both are newcomers to the form, and it shows. The piece, which tackles a timely subject—the toll that forced migration takes on children—is structurally incoherent and narratively amorphous; it misses the target.
Ms. Schlesinger, a playwright, found her subject in a 2017 New Yorker article about “resignation syndrome,” a malady in which refugee children facing deportation from Sweden fell into an unresponsive sleep lasting months or even years. The libretto imagines such a sleeper, H’ala, on a journey to the Underworld, or perhaps Purgatory. Accompanied by Crow (a bird), she meets other sleepers who tell their stories of displacement. This central sequence is bookended by scenes that have a pair of doctors proposing treatments, and H’ala’s mother, Hannah, decrying the circumstances that brought them to this pass.
In theory, this makes sense; in practice, the story isn’t clear, and the libretto’s conflation of myth and reality is confusing. There are unexplained elements: The chorus is called “extinct birds” in the printed libretto but unidentified on stage; a bouncy number begins with “Jeb Fezos is flying to the moon” and ends with Crow getting shot, out of nowhere. Hannah’s maternal fury—the doctors insist that separating the sleeping child from the mother will cure her—feels tacked on rather than organic, and there’s a lot of lecturing about weapons, American warmaking and the evils of capitalism. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the text is spoken rather than sung; a phrase like “your legislative processes that exclude us” doesn’t lend itself to music.
Most centrally, the children’s traumas are recounted rather than felt, since Ms. Chaker’s music, despite its appealing and unusual elements, isn’t very dramatic. Of Lebanese background, Ms. Chaker deftly integrates Arabic scales and techniques into Western musical language, most strikingly in vocal melismas. But much of her other vocal writing is undistinguished, and when characters switch from speech into song, the bland line, often made up of repeated notes, doesn’t seem all that different. In a few instances, musical originality did create character. As Sophia, one of the children, soprano Sarah Shafer sang a hypnotic, high-flying, melismatic aria, “It never stops snowing where I live,” conveying her sense of being completely unmoored. Later, Crow (the affecting tenor Karim Sulayman) captured the opera’s intended dreamlike state in a haunting lament of loss, “You were just here, sweet bird.” One wished for more moments like those.
Contralto Sharmay Musacchio deployed impressive low notes as Swift (another one of the children) and Dr. Overcast; soprano Teryn Kuzma was a bright-voiced H’ala; mezzo Taylor-Alexis Dupont gamely navigated the thankless role of Hannah; baritone Leroy Davis brought some wit to Blue Dove (a thieving child) and Dr. Undertow. Kamna Gupta was the able conductor, effective in the numerous, moody orchestral interludes; notable instrumental sounds included a hammered dulcimer.
The staging by Maya Zbib and Omar Abi Azar, both credited as director and dramaturg, did not mitigate the opera’s confusions. Joelle Aoun’s scenic design, which featured some large rocks, and James Ingalls’s murky lighting were no more illuminating. Sarah Leterrier’s contemporary costumes were hard to see in the gloom. For the final scenes, everyone had some bird feather accessories, but like the ending itself, their meaning was unclear. The traumas of migration and asylum are serious issues, but “Ruinous Gods” is no help.
Rachel Christopher and Hadi Tabbal
PHOTO: WILLIAM STRUHS
In their striking play “The Song of Rome,” which also had its world premiere at Spoleto, Denis O’Hare and Lisa Peterson offer a more sophisticated critique of modern politics through the lens of Virgil’s “Aeneid” and its origins. It begins as a feminist investigation—The Girl wonders why there are no women’s voices in the texts of Roman history—and evolves. Actors Rachel Christopher and Hadi Tabbal switch easily among different roles in three perspectives on the story: Octavia, whose brother Augustus commissioned the Aeneid, discusses its creation with Virgil; Sheree, a contemporary college student who needs to cram Roman history, hires Azem, an undocumented Syrian, as her tutor; and the Girl and the Man (her assistant) uncover the epic through artmaking.
As the intellectual relationships between the named characters blossom in 30 B.C. and the present day, the themes gradually unfold. The Aeneid was conceived as a foundational myth for Rome, linking Augustus—who was ending the Republic and establishing himself as emperor—with a heroic past. Virgil is troubled about writing propaganda but is carried away by the lure of storytelling and poetry. Octavia comes to understand the toxic nature of her brother’s ambition and how her own efforts will be forgotten. Sheree is aghast at all the rape in Roman history (Lucretia, the Sabine women) yet cannot see how the violence and autocracy in the service of empire that she decries in the ancient texts have their modern equivalents: She has no sympathy for Azem, who is about to be deported on a technicality. “We’re not a republic anymore,” Octavia says. “How did it happen?” “Little by little,” is the answer. The Girl’s conclusion about what should be done with poisonous foundational myths—burn them, and start over—is shocking, yet somehow logical.
Piles of books cover the stage (Rachel Hauck designed the set); Scott Zielinski’s lighting adeptly shifts between time periods; Mark Bennett’s pounding music goes along with the Girl as she explores the text with dancing and real-time video. Under Ms. Peterson’s astute direction, the two excellent actors established their different characters and time periods—even when slipping seamlessly from one to the other, as when Virgil/Azem reads to Octavia/Sheree from the idiomatic Robert Fagles translation of Aeneas’s descent into the underworld. That moment, with its depiction of dead souls, and Octavia’s anguish on hearing it, is the crux of the play: It’s a graphic depiction of how the seductiveness of beautiful poetry leads readers and listeners to uncritically accept its premises, however false and dangerous they may be.
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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