‘Eat the Document’ Review: The Prototype Festival’s Musical Fugitives

This year’s edition of the festival opened with a compelling rock-influenced opera, based on Dana Spiotta’s novel about two 1970s radicals who go underground after a protest bombing goes awry.

By 

Heidi Waleson

Jan. 13, 2025 at 5:04 pm ET

The cast of ‘Eat the Document.’ PHOTO: MARIA BARANOVA

New York

According to its co-founder and co-artistic director Beth Morrison, the Prototype Festival is a place for music-theater pieces that defy categorization. “Eat the Document,” which opened this year’s festival on Thursday at HERE, is a case in point. John Glover’s score, which takes many of its cues from pop and rock music of the 1970s and 1990s, is like a concept album, shaped into a compelling narrative by Kelley Rourke’s smart, well-distilled libretto.

Based on Dana Spiotta’s 2006 novel, “Eat the Document” is the tale of Mary and Bobby, two radicals who go underground separately when their Vietnam War protest bombing goes awry. The action toggles between the early 1970s, following Mary as she changes her name to Caroline and tries to figure out her future, and the late 1990s, when she is living as Louise, with Jason, her 15-year-old son. Also in the 1990s, Bobby has become Nash, who runs an alternative bookstore and meeting place for a new generation of activist youths.

Different singers play the two protagonists as their younger and older selves, and the production’s eight performers embody multiple roles, reinforcing emotional resonances between the eras. Most notably, soprano Danielle Buonaiuto is both Mary/Caroline and Miranda, a principled young woman with a crush on Nash, while tenor Tim Russell is both young Bobby and the questing teenager Jason, who is obsessed with the outtakes and bootlegs of the music of his mother’s youth. All the passionate young people contrast with the older ones: Nash (Paul Pinto) is wry and a bit cynical; Louise (Amy Justman) is worn down with living her cover.

The music also binds the two eras. The first half of the show plays with their relationship in a series of vivid musical set pieces. “No More,” the opening choral anthem of protest, which could apply to either era, has a whiff of “Les Miz”; when Jason drops the needle on a precious vintage record, what comes out is the hymn-like ensemble “On Repeat,” Mr. Glover’s musical response to “Our Prayer” from the Beach Boys’ unreleased album “Smile.” There’s a critical stance as well: Caroline, listening to the song in a later scene, notes the loneliness in its sweetness—“Like slightly off, rancid America.”

The bookstore hosts a series of musical manifestos. Sissy, a ’90s radical (Natalie Trumm), performs an almost comically explosive rock ’n’ roll rant, “Unsustainable,” protesting animal cruelty; Miranda’s more insidious, a cappella number suggests that to make a difference, “you have to put yourself on the line.” Nash, pushing back against the “burn it down” enthusiasm of the young, leads a waltz, playfully proposing entertainment instead of violence as resistance to contemporary wrongs, while back in the ’70s, Mel (Adrienne Danrich) delivers “Write On,” a stirring feminist declaration. Quick plot scenes are deftly sandwiched between—and sometimes within—the songs. 

In the second half, plot dominates. The turning point comes when Louise tells Jason that she once danced in a bar with the Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson, one of his musical heroes, and Jason starts investigating her past. After that, the music is less striking, except for the poignant duet in which Caroline turns into Louise and leaves her old life—and the promise of a reunion with Bobby—behind forever, until Jason’s probing reaches its inevitable conclusion.

The terrific cast handled the variety of vocal demands skillfully. Michael Kuhn showed off fine pop styling in “On Repeat”; in the role of hippie chick Berry, who meets an on-the-run Caroline, Ms. Trumm’s sweet soprano sounded like a totally different voice from that of her ranting Sissy. Bass Paul Chwe MinChul An supplied a savage rasp as Henry, a man in perpetual agony over the ravages of chemical weapons used in Vietnam; in one creepy number, he was backed by a male trio sweetly chanting lines like “Phosgene gas smells of new mown hay.” The septet of string quartet, drums, guitar and piano, led from the keyboard by music director Mila Henry, segued easily between rock band and classical ensemble.

Kristin Marting, who also developed the piece, directed a cohesive production. Peiyi Wong’s set—bookstore shelves hung with string lights, blending into a living room and incorporating the band—made the time transitions seamless with the aid of Ayumu “Poe” Saegusa’s lighting. Rashidah Nelson’s costumes evoked the periods—Mel’s crocheted ’70s sweater; Berry’s peasant skirt and beads; the striped button-down shirt (worn open) and khakis of Josh (Mr. Kuhn), the “hacktivist” who goes to work for the corporate enemy, devising a “franchised alternative community.”

The opera’s title name-checks the unreleased film of a 1966 Bob Dylan tour, mentioned in the novel though not the libretto. Like “Smile,” it’s one of many anchoring references to artistic arcana beloved (and hunted down) by aficionados, just as Jason hunts down his mother’s buried past—which she, like the artists, has rejected as unsuitable for release. Knowledge of the underpinnings helps, but even without it, “Eat the Document” conveys the tragedy of its protagonists’ blighted lives along with the ongoing fervor of protest by a newer, savvier generation of activists, who are perhaps too self-interested to make the mistakes of their predecessors.

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).