Review proving Up Set in 1868 Nebraska Takes a Somber Look at the American Dream
Review: An Opera Reaches the American Dream'south Brooding Middle
- Proving Up
- NYT Critic's Choice
A tense and creepy journey into the heart of Manifest Destiny'south darkness, the opera "Proving Up" instructs us, teeth clenched, that the American dream eludes even — particularly — those who give everything to gain it.
Composed by Missy Mazzoli, with a libretto by Royce Vavrek, the brooding work had its New York premiere on Wed at the Miller Theater at Columbia University. While it'due south well worth hearing, in that location's just one more operation, on Friday evening, and it's most sold out.
Only this is hardly the last we'll be hearing from Ms. Mazzoli. Recently, the Metropolitan Opera announced that she and Jeanine Tesori would be the first female composers it would commission. (It's near time.) For Ms. Mazzoli, that ways 2 new operas: a mainstage spectacle, likely based on the George Saunders novel "Lincoln in the Bardo," and a chamber piece to be performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
"Proving Up" is on a chamber scale: a running time of less than ninety minutes, an orchestra of about a dozen, seven people onstage, no chorus. Information technology turns that intimacy into grim claustrophobia.
Based on a Karen Russell story that in plow owes a debt to the apocalyptic Westerns of Cormac McCarthy, the opera riffs on a item of American history. The Homestead Human activity of 1862 — by which settlers, mainly west of the Mississippi River, could acquire public country they'd farmed, or "prove up" — contained an odd provision: To exist considered for the country grant, the homesteads, among other requirements, had to include a glass window.
"Proving Upward" takes that tiny footnote and enlarges information technology into horror and heartbreak. The Zegner family, which has settled on the barbarous, drought-ridden Nebraska plains a few years afterward the Homestead Human action'south passage, is struggling for survival, only has managed to acquire a window. In that location'south a rumor that a authorities inspector has arrived in the area to corroborate the state grants. Every bit a chip of frontier generosity, the Zegners send their younger son to share the window — only for the duration of the inspection, of course — with a nearby homestead that lacks ane.
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As in her 2016 opera "Breaking the Waves," Ms. Mazzoli conjures bleakness with an uncanny, confident mixture of instrumental savagery and eerie lightness, equally when a moody orchestral tempest recedes into the glassy drone of harmonicas. (Glassiness is, unsurprisingly, a quality of much of the score.) The shadowy sound of guitars drifts through the music; Ms. Mazzoli'due south cluttered refractions of hoedown fiddling occasionally explode within a mural of jittery unease. Sudden drooping slides and players sawing away at their cord instruments, punctuated past the somberly shuddering twang of horn and trumpet, requite a sense of wandering and rootlessness.
The balance of the elemental and ethereal is present in the vocal lines, likewise, peculiarly for Miles, the son chosen for the fatal errand. The tenor Michael Slattery, alternately raw and pure, is persuasively childlike without mugging; John Moore and Talise Trevigne, every bit his parents, rise to more than mature passions, their desperation and hurt plainly. Abigail Nims and Cree Carrico sinuously chatter as the ghosts of their two daughters, dead on the prairie. (Yes, this is a ghost story, too.)
The managing director James Darrah sets the desolate tale amid unpainted woods and a stage-filling plot of soil. When "Proving Upwardly" was presented at Opera Omaha in April, later having its premiere at Washington National Opera in January, the playing space was a catwalk, with the audience on either side, for an experience that must have been unsettlingly immersive.
Even at the Miller, a traditional proscenium theater, the opera insinuates itself nether the skin. The story is ready entirely in the by, only its depiction of the stubborn delusions that fueled American expansionism — and the ways in which "proving up" comes to mean both having a home and being a virile man — feels entirely current.
Least successful is the portrayal of the mysterious, malignant stranger, a kind of affections of death, who dominates the last chunk of the opera. A figure of space threat in Ms. Russell's story — you're reminded of Judge Holden from Mr. McCarthy's novel "Blood Meridian" — he is, equally played by Andrew Harris in the opera, a grumpily stentorian, all-also-real presence.
He makes less impact every bit an onstage character than he did as a quasi-fantastical force in prose. Opera is generally skillful at taking naturalistic, even workaday, subject matter and heightening it into stylization; this last part of "Proving Up" does the opposite — to, I think, its detriment. If the sequences with the Sodbuster, as the opera dubs him, retain chilling forcefulness, it'south largely because of Mr. Slattery's Miles, whose fearfulness is underplayed and feels very real.
But Ms. Mazzoli and Mr. Vavrek's last tweak to Ms. Russell's story, suggesting the initiation — or, perhaps, continuation — of a cycle of resentment and retributive violence, is a spooky touch. If anxieties about possession and manliness continue to fray our national life, "Proving Up" proposes that here our troubles began.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/27/arts/music/review-proving-up-missy-mazzoli.html
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