June 9 & 11, 2022
Pullman Yards
Atlanta, Georgia – USA
Alexandra Enyart, conductor; Stephanie Havey, stage director. Laura Kaminsky, music & concept; Mark Campbell & Kimberly Reed, libretto; Kimberly Reed, film. Cast: Lucia Lucas (Hannah before), Blythe Gaissert (Hannah after). Creative: Emma Antenen, scenic designer; Erik Teague, costume designer; Marcella Barbeau, lighting designer; Melanie Steele, wig & makeup designer; Nicholas Hussong & Nicholas Chimienti, projection co-designers; Jon Summers, sound designer; Felipe Barral & Amanda Sachtleben, filmed media; David Young, associate sound designer.
KAMINSKY: As One
Mark Gresham | 13 JUN 2022
It has been 50 years since the children’s entertainment album Free to Be You and Me was originally released.
Created by Marlo Thomas and featuring notable celebrities of the era, the basic premise of the audio LP was to encourage post-1960s gender neutrality and promote values such as individuality, tolerance, and comfort with one’s identity. A significant theme of the album is that it’s okay to reject gender stereotypes found in children’s books at the time and that anyone can achieve anything, whether a boy or a girl.
Now a half-century later, it was only last year that the album was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the Library of Congress and chosen worthy of preservation in the National Recording Registry.
In that era, what we like to call “The Sixties” (by which we typically mean 1964 -1973), social, intellectual, and political liberalism dreamed of and pushed in favor of a genderless and colorless society. The former was expressed in Unisex fashion as much as in career, domestic, and broad social equality between sexes. The latter, in the iconic words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
Today, that particular liberal idealism seems to have been turned on its head by the progressive imperative that nothing is more critical than group identity, especially racial and gender identity, in the context of an intersectional politic demanding complete conformity. If you identify this way, you must support these things. And it’s the group you identify with that most matters, not your personal identity or values as an individual.
These progressive axioms are anathema for the dialectics on the other end of the political spectrum.
After publishing a review of Matt Walsh’s video What is a Woman? (a contentious if soft-toned interview with a Dr. Michaelle Forcier, MD, a pediatrics professor at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University specializing in gender, sexual and reproductive health) conservative blogger Matt Taibbi received an avalanche of blowback from progressive activists.
Taibbi subsequently published a June 10 response on his TK News blog emphasizing the difference between “debate” and “bigotry.” He then posted the link with a comment on Twitter the same day, to which Tesla CEO Elon Musk responded. Here’s a screenshot of that brief exchange:
Cropped screenshot from Twitter, June 11, 2022, exchange between Matt Taibbi and Elon Musk. (Click to enlarge.)
Taibbi’s tweet has since disappeared from Twitter along with all comments.
Worth noting here that one of Musk’s children, who recently turned 18, filed a request in April with the Los Angeles County Superior Court in Santa Monica for a new birth certificate reflecting a gender change from male to female and a name change from Xavier Alexander Musk to Vivian Jenna Wilson, taking the mother’s surname, according to TMZ.
“I absolutely support trans, but all these pronouns are an esthetic nightmare,” Musk tweeted back in 2020.
However, there remains an enormous yawning gap between the extremes of those who want to enforce the use of chosen pronouns with civil or criminal penalties and those who reject the validity of transgender entirely. There seems to be no room for mutual understanding or even allowance of disagreement.
Against this socially and politically heated background of our current times, The Atlanta Opera recently presented As One, a chamber opera composed by Laura Kaminsky with a libretto by Mark Campbell and Kimberly Reed that tells the coming-of-age story of Hannah, a transgender woman.
As One had its world premiere in September 2014 with American Opera Projects at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and, according to The Atlanta Opera’s general and artistic director Tomer Zvulun, has enjoyed performances in over 50 cities since then.
The Atlanta Opera mounted its production of As One on June 9 and 11 at Pullman Yards, as part of its Discoveries Series “Come As You Are Festival,” sandwiched in between performances of its highly successful production of Cabaret.
Of the two, As One is the much smaller production, involving only two singers representing Hannah (mezzo-soprano Blythe Gaissert and transgender-heldenbaritone Lucia Lucas), a string quartet with a conductor (Alexandra Enyart, who is also transgender). It also includes film elements by co-librettist Kimberly Reed.
Lucia Lucas as Hannah Before and Blythe Gaissert as Hannah After (credit: Raftermen)
The opera presents the story in a series of episodes that form a “memoryscape” of Hannah’s life. In previous production descriptions, the baritone voice represents “Hannah before” and the mezzo-soprano “Hannah after.” But in her program notes, stage director Stephanie Havey says:
That seems to be a chronological reversal of the roles, perhaps to accommodate the fact that Lucas is transgender, but that shouldn’t be a factor. If she can portray Don Giovanni to critical acclaim, she can as easily portray a pre-trans biological male on the path to being transgender. After all, “trouser roles” have a long operatic tradition, and, except for vocal range, such roles can be played as easily by a trans-baritone as by a mezzo-soprano.
(Consider Der Rosenkavalier: Could a transgender baritone hypothetically sings Octavian an octave lower? The Atlanta Opera had no trouble transforming the tenor role of Beppe in Pagliacci to make it a suitable en travesti role for mezzo-soprano Megan Marino. Opera is, after all, a most adaptable of species.)
An actor’s skills involve the ability to portray roles that are not just extensions of their own personality or type but go beyond its boundaries, beyond typecasting, outside of the circles others draw around us to define our identity for their own satisfactions and comfort – and even the circles we might draw around ourselves.
But then, this is, after all, one of the points of the story of As One, so well stated in the words of E.E. Cummings in his 1944 essay, “A Poet’s Advice to Students”: “To be nobody-but-yourself-in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody but yourself means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.”
Gaissert, who has been involved with As One since its workshop days, possesses a warm but fluid voice that seemed ideal for the mezzo-soprano Hannah. Lucas, the first trans opera singer to come out publicly, has a forceful dramatic voice and high register that works very well for the baritone Hannah. But this is, in many ways, an actor’s opera with theatrical emphasis, much declamatory singing, and a little thin on the memorable side of tunes.
As effective as Kaminsky’s music is as a bed for the drama and as approachable enough in its post-minimalist foundations, even with a few familiar idioms like fiddling, the audience doesn’t come away with many musical moments that stick in the head. One that does is where the ancient Christian hymn for Advent, “O come, O come, Emmanuel,” evokes Hannah’s loneliness and separation from family as Christmas approaches. It brings to mind the third line of the first English verse, “That mourns in lonely exile here,” quite poignantly.
The libretto by Campbell and Reed tells Hannah’s story effectively, taking us through her internal and external challenges and occasional joys in a sequence of episodes, the end of each marked visually by the raising of a different hanging paper lantern up into the flies. It is at its most effective when exploring Hannah’s relationships with engaging society and solitude, as well as her growing self-knowledge. It is least effective in those rare moments when it becomes somewhat “teachy-preachy” and comes off as a socio-political dialectic.
The audience on that Saturday was small, and one could easily guess primarily was made up of the already-won-over as far as transgender issues are concerned. That relatively sparse attendance was unfortunate for a new opera with a critical reputation for being ground-breaking. But while intellectually convincing in its arguments, in today’s heated climate As One is not likely to reach a broader audience and persuade them emotionally.
With only relatively small forces required to produce it, As One will undoubtedly continue to find frequent presentations in many places, most frequently in larger urban centers, but will remain a chamber opera with more of a devoted cult following than not – at least until our times change. ■
EXTERNAL LINKS:
- The Atlanta Opera: atlantaopera.org
- Blythe Gaissert: blythegaissert.com
- Lucia Lucas: lucialucas.com
- Laura Kaminsky: laurakaminsky.com
- Mark Campbell: markcampbellwords.com
- Kimberly Reed: kimberlyreed.com
- Alexandra Enyart: alexandraenyart.com
- Stephanie Havey: stephaniehavey.com
Mark Gresham is publisher and principal writer of EarRelevant. he began writing as a music journalist over 30 years ago, but has been a composer of music much longer than that. He was the winner of an ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award for music journalism in 2003.
.png){kind=logo}