At WNO’s American Opera Initiative, three glimpses into the future

But the highlight of the evening was its centerpiece, “Forever” — quite easily the strangest opera I’ve ever seen. Rather than dig into humanity for material, composer Elizabeth Gartman and librettist Melisa Tien dispose of it altogether, opting instead for a world populated by humanistic petrochemicals and tenacious microorganisms.

Thus, “Forever” stages a meet-cute of sorts at an abandoned superfund site between two star-crossed polyfluoroalkyl substances — one derived from an Applebee’s Quesadilla Burger Wrapper (soprano Teresa Perrotta), the other left over from an Apple Watch Ultra Wristband (tenor Sahel Salam). Into this solution enters a temptress, Tardigrade (contralto Cecelia McKinley), the last of her kind, who threatens their budding love by luring one of the polyfluoroalkyl substances into a crater of liquid mercury. We’ve all been there.

The prestigious incubator program for young composers and librettists presented three short works in progress at the Kennedy Center

Review by Michael Andor Brodeur for the Washington Post

Jonathan Pierce Rhodes in the Washington National Opera’s “Hairpiece” at the Kennedy Center. (Bronwen Sharp)

On Friday night at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater, three new operas took their first steps as part of the American Opera Initiative (AOI), the Washington National Opera’s enduring incubator program for young teams of composers and librettists.

Under the guidance of three mentors — conductor David Bloom, playwright and librettist Deborah Brevoort, and composer (and AOI alumnus) Kamala Sankaram — the creative duos are tasked with turning one year of work into 20 minutes of opera. This is no small challenge on two fronts. For one, fully staged operas can require several years of development before they even graze a stage. For another, 20 minutes of time has all the flexibility of an iron bar. Bending it into a narrative arc is nothing short of a feat of strength.

As test kitchens go, the AOI has a strong track record. Now in its 11th season, the initiative has commissioned more than 40 operas and mentored dozens of creative teams, more than half of whom continue to work together. Damien Geter and Lila Palmer’s “American Apollo,” for instance, first emerged as a short for AOI in 2021 and will receive its fully staged world premiere by Des Moines Metro Opera in July.

And although the lightning-round approach to opera taken by AOI produces mixed results each year, that’s sort of the point: Ideas set loose in these operas often seem like the products of either deep personal memories or flashes of sudden inspiration. They have a snapshot energy in an art form that must often endure the slow dry of an oil painting.

But, like a snapshot, short operas produced in a rush can also conspicuously lack the very elements that make opera work: artful framing, comprehensive orchestration and the time it takes to replace one reality with another.

With a strong ensemble of singers from the Cafritz Young Artists program singing the roles, and 13 players from the Washington National Opera Orchestra supplying the music from onstage, each of these short operas admirably managed to surmount the roughness and draftiness of a rough draft.

Sergio Martínez, Winona Martin and Kresley Figueroa in the Washington National Opera’s “A Way Forward” at the Kennedy Center. (Bronwen Sharp)

With “A Way Forward,” composer Laura Jobin-Acosta and librettist José Alba Rodríguez capture the crisis point of the family behind Panaderia Gabriel, a Mexican bakery in Queens specializing in conchas and facing imminent foreclosure. Appropriately, it’s a tale told with warmth and sweetness, even if its attempt to weave a multigenerational tapestry comes off a bit like hurried knitting.

Mezzo-soprano Winona Martin and soprano Kresley Figueroa whipped up instantly convincing chemistry as abuelita Helena and distractible granddaughter Julia — Rodríguez’s lithe lines effectively threading long traditions through simple details. (“Flour! Water! Butter! Cinnamon!”) The sturdy bass of Sergio Martínez served the financially stressed patriarch Gabriel well, despite the character’s sole emotional note as he strives to update the bakery with organic fruit juice, imported coffee and touch-screen menus.

Rodríguez suffuses his libretto with lovely detail and realism. And although some of the poetry was perplexing (“Your hand moves are in my blood”) and some of the expression wooden (“If we use social media, the word will spread!”), and although the characters sometimes felt more like avatars of motive than examples of people, Jobin-Acosta’s music bestowed an ease and vivacity that made the inner lives of the family easily accessible. “A Way Forward” could be a revelatory treat, given a bit more time to proof.

I was especially moved by “Hairpiece,” a smartly situated study of otherness from composer Joy Redmond and librettist Sam Norman. Centered on the Midtown Manhattan shop of veteran wig maker Esther, the story follows her encounter with 21-year-old Ari, an “aspiring artist questioning their gender and much else,” and the latter’s encounter with the widower Gale, “a young man wrecked by grief and early hair loss.”

Hair becomes the connective thread that intertwines the characters: Ari, splendidly and sensitively voiced by tenor Jonathan Pierce Rhodes, sports a cheap mop of bubble-gum pink. Gale, compassionately embodied by baritone Justin Burgess, dons a tragic rug. And Esther, sung by the standout soprano Tiffany Choe, tends to an exquisite $5,000 masterpiece on her workbench. In the hands of this trio, hair becomes a material of access, identity, desire and dignity.

Somehow, Redmond and Norman keep a multitude of emotional and melodic themes from tangling up in knots. Choe’s opening aria, “To Make a Wig,” was a bracing introduction to Redmond’s music and Norman’s poetry — each well-paced and keenly sharpened. Redmond is especially good at capturing the uncertain energy between strangers, a tension suspended in long lines of woodwind, blinks of piano, nervous pulses of percussion. And she’s a stunning singer, nimble and controlled.

And despite the heavy emotional stakes at play, the opera — brief as it was — was buoyed by a welcome lightness and a hopeful note. “Hairpiece” has great potential to tell a grander story about the many ways we become ourselves. Color me teased.

But the highlight of the evening was its centerpiece, “Forever” — quite easily the strangest opera I’ve ever seen. Rather than dig into humanity for material, composer Elizabeth Gartman and librettist Melisa Tien dispose of it altogether, opting instead for a world populated by humanistic petrochemicals and tenacious microorganisms.

Thus, “Forever” stages a meet-cute of sorts at an abandoned superfund site between two star-crossed polyfluoroalkyl substances — one derived from an Applebee’s Quesadilla Burger Wrapper (soprano Teresa Perrotta), the other left over from an Apple Watch Ultra Wristband (tenor Sahel Salam). Into this solution enters a temptress, Tardigrade (contralto Cecelia McKinley), the last of her kind, who threatens their budding love by luring one of the polyfluoroalkyl substances into a crater of liquid mercury. We’ve all been there.

Provided the apocalypse doesn’t arrive first, a wave of post-apocalyptic opera is approaching. In a production at 2023’s experimental Prototype Festival, Gelsey Bell’s “m??n?? [morning//mourning]” recently explored “a world in which all humans have disappeared from Earth.” And this month’s installment of Prototype featured the premiere of Roman Grygoriv and Illia Razumeiko’s “Chornobyldorf,” an opera in which “the remaining descendants of humanity find themselves in a post-societal world following the death of capitalism, opera, and philosophy.”

But Gartman and Tien’s approach to the end of days is refreshingly absurd and giddy with whimsy. Musically, “Forever” feels composed from the wreckage of the world it leaves behind — especially a portentous jingle that feels like a curse on the human folly of microplastics: “Plastic makes the world go round/ everywhere it can be found/ Fertilizer, hats, shampoo/ Even deep inside of you.”

As the three elements work to bond and discover a new mode of … polymer-amory (?), a new idea of what opera can do is quietly affirmed in “Forever.” Even when all might be lost in a hopeless desert of lifeless toxic sludge, the future feels bright.

Washington National Opera renews commitment to future of American opera

A three-character opera lasting 20 minutes is not a vast canvas, and it turns out that less can be more in a mini-opera. The most successful of the three new works, Forever by Elizabeth Gartman, was also the most frivolous, at least on the surface. Set to a libretto by Melisa Tien, it featured two PFAS chemical molecules (per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, colloquially known as “forever chemicals”) in a post-apocalyptic sludge long after humans are extinct and then making an unexpected bond with a frisky tardigrade (the resilient micro-animal sometimes called a “water bear”).

By Charles T. Downey for the Washington Classical Review

Forever

Sahel Salam, Teresa Perrotta, and Cecelia McKinley performed in Elizabeth Gartman’s Forever for Washington National Opera Friday night. (Photo: Bronwen Sharp)

Washington National Opera earns its middle name every time it mounts an American opera. The company’s American Opera Initiative bears fruit each year with the world premiere of three 20-minute operas by rising composers and librettists. Now in its 11th season, the program presented the newest trio of works Friday night in the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater.

A panel of mentors guides the three librettist-composer pairs through the development and completion of each opera. Christopher Cano, who succeeded Robert Ainsley as director of WNO’s Cafritz Young Artists and AOI at the start of last season, introduced the evening. This year, short videos preceded each work, showing the rehearsal process and featuring the thoughts of the creators and their interpreters, who are all Cafritz Young Artists.

A three-character opera lasting 20 minutes is not a vast canvas, and it turns out that less can be more in a mini-opera. The most successful of the three new works, Forever by Elizabeth Gartman, was also the most frivolous, at least on the surface. Set to a libretto by Melisa Tien, it featured two PFAS chemical molecules (per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, colloquially known as “forever chemicals”) in a post-apocalyptic sludge long after humans are extinct and then making an unexpected bond with a frisky tardigrade (the resilient micro-animal sometimes called a “water bear”).

Soprano Teresa Perrotta, who was one of the vocal highlights of last year’s Grounded, displayed remarkable power, agility, and dramatic presence as PFAS 1, outshone only in comic exuberance by tenor Sahel Salam as PFAS 2. Cecelia McKinley plied her robust contralto to make a surprisingly alluring Tardigrade, costumed in a puffy coat with many sleeves and hands (costumes designed by Timm Burrow).

The silliness of the action (with a climax including the loud singing of the word “Polyamory!”) did not diminish the heavy underlying issue, climate change and plastic pollution. Tien’s libretto provoked a lot of laughter in the audience, for example, in the disparate origins of the two PFAS molecules (one from a luxury watch band and the other a lowly fast-food wrapper). Gartman’s inventive score featured the repeated crunching of plastic objects by the percussionist, a gesture echoed at the end when the two PFAS singers endlessly twisted plastic bottles.

Overly earnest seriousness weighed down both of the other works a bit, confronting issues that probably need more than twenty minutes to handle adequately. Sam Norman’s libretto for Hairpiece dealt with a wigmaker named Esther, who agrees to help Ari, a young trans woman, acquire a new wig that will make her feel more feminine. The issue seemed particularly relevant to the composer, Joy Redmond, herself a trans woman.

Tiffany Choe’s pliant soprano suited the feisty Esther, who seemed to be the focus of the opera until Ari arrived. Tenor Jonathan Pierce Rhodes delivered a sympathetic and nuanced interpretation of Ari, extending the dramatic range he has already shown in Blue and The Passion of Mary Cardwell Dawson last year. The crisis of the story is that Ari, dressed in false breasts and a champagne pink fright wig, was mistaken for a drag queen by a man named Gale, played with otherwise affable qualities by baritone Justin Burgess.

Hairpiece

Jonathan Pierce Rhodes (Ari) and Justin Burgess (Gale) in Joy Redmond’s Hairpiece for Washington National Opera (Photo: Bronwen Sharp)

While Redmond’s musical style tended toward the chaotic, in a score overstuffed with a panoply of musical styles, Laura Jobin-Acosta hewed to the plain and staid in her contribution, called A Way Forward. The libretto by José Alba Rodríguez centered on three generations of an immigrant Mexican family and its bakery: a conservative grandmother who wants to preserve traditions, a son who wants to modernize the business, and a Gen Z granddaughter who finds a way to satisfy both sides, somewhat predictably, by manipulating social media.

The refulgent mezzo-soprano Winona Martin, who made an impression during an earlier apprenticeship at Wolf Trap Opera, anchored the piece as the stiff-necked abuela, Helena. Bass Sergio Martínez gave a potent rendition of Gabriel’s sober aria (“I’m the son”), but soprano Kresley Figueroa, while dramatically convincing, sounded pinched and thin in the upper reaches as the young Julia.

Conductor David Bloom made an auspicious WNO debut at the podium, ably managing both the thirteen-person chamber orchestra, spread out unevenly at the back of the stage, and the singers. Director Chloe Treat, also in her company debut, suggested the three settings with a smattering of objects and set pieces. The most inventive semi-staging came in Forever, centered on three poles and some plastic cartons for the PFAS chemicals to dart around in. A large mirror propped up to one side of the stage evoked the pool of mercury where the Tardigrade swam, grinning like a dystopian Cheshire Cat.

WNO will not return to the Kennedy Center Opera House until its production of Puccini’s Turandot, May 11 to 25. kennedy-center.org

THE HAPPIEST MAN ON EARTH by Mark St. Germain Wins a Berkie

Playwright Mark St. Germain
Kenneth Tigar as Eddie Jaku

The seventh annual Berkshire Theatre Critics Association Awards, known as the Berkies took place this week, where a total of 27 awards in 22 categories were presented for shows that were produced between Oct. 1, 2022 and Sept. 30, 2023 at theaters in and around the Berkshires.

The Sally and Robert Sugarman Award for a world premiere of a new play or musical was presented to playwright Mark St. Germain for The Happiest Man on Earth, produced by Barrington Stage Company. Kenneth Tigar’s performance in St. Germain’s play as concentration camp survivor Eddie Jaku earned him the award for outstanding solo performance.

Winners were announced Monday, Nov. 13, in ceremonies at Zion Lutheran Church on First Street, hosted by BTCA president J. Peter Bergman and Macey Levin.

In a new D.C. play, Lincoln’s head goes missing. Cue the laugh track.

‘Monumental Travesties’ at Mosaic Theater Company makes the vandalism of a controversial statue a source of comedy

Review by Peter Marks for The Washington Post

From left, Louis E. Davis, Jonathan Feuer and Renee Elizabeth Wilson in the world premiere of Psalmayene 24’s “Monumental Travesties,” by Mosaic Theater Company. (Chris Banks)

What says ally-ship quite like a White man with Black Lives Matter emblazoned on his tighty whities? It’s a question you’ve probably never thought of asking. But playwright Psalmayene 24 nevertheless seeks to answer it — er, cheekily — in “Monumental Travesties,” the entertainingly transgressive comedy getting a world premiere by D.C.’s Mosaic Theater Company.

Psalmayene 24 (nee Gregory Morrison) has written an absurdist three-character satire poking fun at all the pieties about race, especially as espoused by White liberals looking for absolution from their Black friends and associates. The subject is as ripe for ribbing today as was sending up Archie Bunker’s bigotry on “All in the Family” in the 1970s. Some of Psalmayene’s plot contrivances, in fact, reflect the blatantly cringe-making pivots of vintage sitcoms.

But the conventions of bygone TV comedy provide a surprisingly safe space for a subject around which thoughtful people still tread lightly (even if Psalmayene and Reginald L. Douglas, his skillful director at the Atlas Performing Arts Center, might rethink the 90-minute play’s ending, which lands with a confusing thud).

“I grew up in a house that used to be a stop on the Underground Railroad!” protests Jonathan Feuer’s Adam, the overbearing White neighbor desperate to establish his worthiness to the Black couple (Louis E. Davis and Renee Elizabeth Wilson) next door. It is in the becoming D.C. home of Davis’s Chance and Wilson’s Brenda — brightly rendered by set designer Andrew R. Cohen — that “Monumental Travesties” takes place. And that’s where the story begins when Chance, a local activist/performance artist, bursts in the front door, bearing the head of Abraham Lincoln.

A real-life controversy inspires the mechanics of “Monumental Travesties”: Chance has severed Lincoln’s head from the Emancipation Statue in D.C.’s Lincoln Park, a monument dedicated in 1876 that in recent years has been decried as a humiliating depiction of White savior mentality. (Eleanor Holmes Norton, D.C.’s delegate in Congress, has introduced legislation to have it removed.) The statue features a godlike Lincoln astride a kneeling, formerly enslaved man in a loincloth — his servile gratitude could not be more apparent.

Renee Elizabeth Wilson and Louis E. Davis in Mosaic Theater Company’s “Monumental Travesties,” directed by Reginald L. Douglas. (Chris Banks)

The giant head, by props designer Deb Thomas, sits on Chance and Brenda’s coffee table like an emblem of history’s ossified portrait of slavery from a White perspective; Chance’s vandalism is part of his campaign to “deconstruct symbols of White supremacy.” At one point, he enlists the compliant Adam in reversing the postures of the statue, having Adam prostrate himself before Chance in his living room. “So this is what it feels like, huh,” Chance remarks, “being White in America?”

The sharpest junctures of “Monumental Travesties” involve Chance and Brenda bearing witness to Adam’s outrageously self-serving platitudes. He’s so evolved, he insists, that he considers himself “un-White,” whatever that means, and so attuned to the injustices against people of color that he can recite from memory testaments to the indigenous Anacostan people on whose land his pricey townhouse sits. Chance and Brenda are not, for their part, above using Black victimhood to gain social and economic advantage: Brenda, for instance, concocts for Adam a shameful lie about a relative’s murder to explain the money she got to buy the house. (The truth, Psalmayene 24 implies, would be harder for a White person to believe.)

What’s also implicit in “Monumental Travesties” is the notion that conscientious people both Black and White still have to “act” for each other, that what they say in each other’s presence is a varnished version of what they really think. (Although the dramatist also points out that Brenda and Chance harbor problems and secrets, too, that they’re not willing to confront.) Chance’s absconding with Lincoln’s detached head is, in a sense, a cut to the chase about race: Talk isn’t good enough, he’s declaring, not even about the father of emancipation. Only action matters.

Davis, Wilson and Feuer demonstrate their acumen concerning broad comedy; their roles are archetypes, somewhat short of three dimensions, much the way sitcom characters are defined by a single trait recycled in one episode after another. Costume designer Moyenda Kulemeka gives pleasing pizazz to Brenda’s outfits, particularly the historic garb devised for the play’s final movement, when Brenda introduces another factual detail that complicates Chance’s facile rationale for his crime.

Under Douglas’s guidance, the actors amiably navigate the plot turns, which become ever crazier. The dramatist packs in so many curveballs that some are inevitably going to be wild pitches. (“Monumental Travesties” has to be the first play to use the brain fog resulting from long covid as a pivotal narrative point.) But even with some bumps, Psalmayene has paved a way for comedy to be another dramatic tool for understanding.

Monumental Travesties, by Psalmayene 24. Directed by Reginald L. Douglas. Set, Andrew R. Cohen; lighting, Alberto Segarra; costumes, Moyenda Kulemeka; sound Nick “the 1da” Hernandez. About 90 minutes. Through Oct. 8 at Atlas Performing Arts Center, 1333 H St. NE. mosaictheater.org.

A playwright, Psalmayene 24, takes down a problematic memorial, with comedy

In Mosaic Theater’s ‘Monumental Travesties,’ playwright Psalmayene 24 critiques D.C.’s controversial Emancipation Memorial

By Celia Wren for The Washington Post

From left: Louis E. Davis, Jonathan Feuer and Renee Elizabeth Wilson in Mosaic Theater’s production of “Monumental Travesties.” (Chris Banks)

The new play “Monumental Travesties” is a comedy, but the perception that sparked it was no laughing matter.

“The seeds of it started with my disdain for the monument,” says playwright Psalmayene 24, speaking just yards from the controversial Emancipation Memorial in Capitol Hill’s Lincoln Park. In his opinion and that of others, the sculpture, dedicated in 1876, demeans the Black man it portrays as kneeling at the feet of Abraham Lincoln, who is holding a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation. Although the monument was commissioned and paid for by African Americans, including people who had been enslaved, an all-White committee oversaw the design. Some detractors — including protesters during the social justice activism of 2020 — have called for the monument’s removal.

Perspective: Yes, D.C.’s Emancipation Memorial advances white supremacy

Psalmayene 24, who goes by Psalm, says he wanted to “alchemize” his contempt for the memorial into something positive. The result is the first comedy the local writer, director and actor has written. A tale of a protester’s irreverent caper, which offs the Lincoln statue’s head, “Monumental Travesties” runs through Oct. 1, mounted by Mosaic Theater Company, where Psalm is the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation playwright-in-residence. The show is performed at the Atlas Performing Arts Center, about a mile from the memorial.

“Monumental Travesties” playwright Psalmayene 24. (Darrow Montgomery)

Mosaic Artistic Director Reginald L. Douglas, who is staging the play, says he wanted to open the company’s season with a work that was joyful, if substantive. “Psalm uses laughter to allow audiences to lean in, which is one of the best gifts of theater,” he says. “We’re all sharing a joke about something quite serious: Conversations around race. Around local and national history. Who gets the opportunity to see themselves represented in monuments, and who does not? And how do we, as neighbors of different races and political affiliations, come together in a dialogue about where we go next?”

Debuting one play that touches on race and history is a notable milestone; Psalmayene 24 is premiering two this month. Running at Joe’s Movement Emporium through Sept. 24 is his interview-based play “Out of the Vineyard,” about legal actions filed against enslavers by enslaved people. Tony Thomas directs and choreographs.

Psalm, age 50 — “the same age as hip-hop,” he jokes — discussed both new works while sitting on a bench near the memorial one mild morning.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

From left: “Monumental Travesties” cast members Jonathan Feuer, Renee Elizabeth Wilson and Louis E. Davis; playwright Psalmayene 24; and director Reginald L. Douglas at the Emancipation Memorial in D.C. (Chris Banks)

Q: When did you first become aware of the Emancipation Memorial?

A: When I came to Howard University. I don’t remember the exact moment I saw it, but it troubled me ever since.

Q: What about it do you disdain?

A: This is a piece of art, and all art is subjective. But to me, it’s pretty unambiguous in terms of the demeaning representation of the Black man. You can see him kneeling in front of Lincoln, and he’s practically nude — he’s only wearing a loincloth — and Lincoln is in this paternalistic superior pose above him. This monument is supposed to be in honor of Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, but I think the artist got it wrong. The Black man kneeling is supposed to be free, but he doesn’t look free. This is a prime example of the type of representation that my work aims to dismantle. My work is all about elevating and uplifting representations of Black people.

Q: Tell me about deciding to write a comedy.

A: I feel it has to be a comedy, because the subject matter is so heavy and can be so polarizing. With the pandemic hopefully in our rearview mirror, I think audiences really want to laugh and want joy. Comedy is a form that I hadn’t written, so this was a formal challenge to myself. I’m making fun of people on both sides of the “woke” aisle. I’m on a certain side of that aisle, too, but I think we’re all ridiculous and absurd.

Q: You have a strong reaction to the statue. Was it difficult to present the other side of the issue?

A: No, because within the boundaries of a comedy, everyone is fair game. No matter what you think should be done with the statue — if you think it should be melted down and poured into the Potomac, if you think it needs to stay up or go to a museum — there is humor that can be mined from that.

Q: Did you do research for “Monumental Travesties”?

A: I did. But a lot of my research actually consisted of coming to this park and observing people. Like right now, there’s a woman walking by. She happens to be looking at the monument. A lot of people don’t even look up at it.

Q: “Out of the Vineyard” is another play that touches on American history.

A: That play is in conversation with “Monumental Travesties.” Brooke Kidd [executive director at Joe’s Movement Emporium] approached me about adapting a book called “A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery From the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War” [by William G. Thomas III]. I did not want to do a period piece. So I interviewed people who in some way are connected to the history of freedom suits: lawsuits, basically, that enslaved people waged pre-Emancipation Proclamation. Many were waged by families in Prince George’s County. Knowing about this history really emphasizes the fact that enslaved peoples were always fighting for their freedom. Which brings me back to the representation [in the Emancipation Memorial]. The statue, for me, represents a fallacy. “Out of the Vineyard” aims to correct that fallacy and bring light to a hidden chapter in America’s history.

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Q: The fallacy being that freedom came from the White savior bestowing it.

A: Exactly. Freedom, as I understand it, is not something that comes from another human being giving it. It is a right that you are born with.

Monumental Travesties

Atlas Performing Arts Center, 1333 H St. NE. 202-399-7993, ext. 501. mosaictheater.org.

Dates: Through Oct. 8.

Prices: $42-$70.

Out of the Vineyard

Joe’s Movement Emporium, 3309 Bunker Hill Rd., Mount Rainier. joesmovement.org.

Dates: Through Sept. 24.

Prices: $25-$40.