Mike Leigh in Yiddish

Just back from Mike Leigh's Two Thousand Years, which is in previews at the Acorn on 42nd Street. I was rather eager to see the play, first because Mike Leigh is horribly amusing (or amusingly horrible), second because he has never dealt with the subject of Jewishness, though he is the son of a Jewish doctor (the name must have been Levy... or something) – it would seem that he scrupulously omits autobiography from his plays, which often developed (so goes the scuttlebutt) from actors' improvisations. My third reason to go is that I am an assimilated Jew, and have always been rather puzzled what this meant, how much it should impact on my existence.

First of all, I should say that there has been no scuttlebutt (so far as I am aware, but I'm 3000 miles away) as to how close or distant anything in Two Thousand Years is to Leigh's own family. It can't be autobiographical, because the play is set roughly in the present day (2004-5), and Leigh would be a bit older than most of his characters. It isn't very close to my experience, either, because though they are an assimilated Jewish family, they are a great deal closer to the Zionist experience than mine has been: some of them were born in Israeli kibbutzes, and all of them toss Yiddish phrases into conversation, whereas when I was growing up, it was very rare to hear a single word of it. (I learned Yiddish phrases from friends at Columbia and tried them out on my grandparents – to their great amusement, as they knew perfectly well I could not have acquired such things in their highly Anglophone homes, where the "mama loshin" was Gilbert & Sullivan, Shakespeare and Mark Twain.)

Second, though the play's title seems to imply that Jewishness is the subject, and perhaps we are intended to keep it in mind during the 21st-century goings-on of half a dozen damaged, dysfunctional and variously hysterical self-absorbed English Jews plus a single well-mannered and considerate Israeli (joke! but he means it) outsider. (There is also an English outsider, painfully present only to provide backstory, if we need it.)

The subject of the play is how disastrously self-absorbed members of the middle classes interact, restrained by civility in the presence of strangers (but unrestrained with relatives). In other words, it's a Mike Leigh play. I've seen Goosepimples and Abigail's Party, and the films Topsy-Turvy and Naked, in which Jews were as conspicuous for their absence as rational behavior. Two Thousand Years is about Jews, on the surface, but underneath it's just another Mike Leigh play where you start giggling and end up cringing, grateful that you're not related to, or sexually involved with, anyone this ghastly. This makes me wonder if the other plays (he's written two dozen or so, most of them too Brit to jump the pond, plus a lot of films, most notably Vera Drake) were not in fact about his family circumstances and not (as they seemed to be) about the contempt of Britain's professional class for the pathetic aspirations of the lower middle classes. (In Britain, everything boils down to class – or does it?)

To an American Jew, it is puzzling that Mike Leigh has never written a play dealing in any perceivable way with his Jewishness – except that Britain's other two most distinguished playwrights, Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard, have never overtly dealt with their Jewishness in their plays either (so far as I know). It is, in other words, a British trait, not a Jewish one, to exercise such restraint. In this country, all our playwrights are autobiographical to one degree or another: Tennessee Williams's plays are about having a romantic and female sensibility in a body that is not going to be able to inhabit such a life; Edward Albee's plays are about the evil of mothers; Cliff Odets's plays are about rising from the (Jewish) underclass successfully enough to sell out; Lillian Hellman's plays are about families keeping evil secrets from one another, right out in the open (she never dealt with her Jewishness onstage either, however); Eugene O'Neill's plays are about Irish myth-making and its poisonous operations in daily life; David Mamet's plays are about the delights and perils of a life of macho bullshit. But British playwrights don't live their mishigoss out in public so overtly. (Another reason it is inane to say Shakespeare couldn't have written Shakespeare because his plays are about royalty and not about being arrested for poaching while courting a pregnant older woman.)

Some years ago I knew a delightful English lady (really, a lady; her husband is a knight), who told me the English are brought up to be so English that all ethnicity fades, or is expected to fade, to become something to put behind one, or under the rug. This is obviously not going to wash with people who look unBrit (skin color, etc.), so it is a doomed aspect of Englishness, but her generation had grown up uncertain whether they were Jewish or not (even if they were observant) or English or not, because they were educated, unconsciously, to regard every otherness as threatening to Englishness, as shameful somehow, as less than proper, as alien ethnic survival. Stop going to a church (or temple) where people believe; go to a nice good Church of England church where it's all about the singing and the decor and how the vicar's wife dresses. Her ladyship told me proudly how pleased she was when her husband got a contract to write a history of Israel: "It meant we had to live there for several years, while our boys were growing up, so they had the experience of being Jews in a place where being Jewish wasn't questioned. And by the time we got home, they both knew they were Jews, whatever else they were, so they've not gone on being slightly ashamed of it. As I suspect many English Jews are."

Well, now to the play (spoilers ahead! don't read this if you haven't seen the play and intend to go):

Dave is a dentist, married to Rachel. Her parents are in the 70s and slowing down, but her father is still irascible as hell. Rachel has a sister, a successful investment banker who hasn't communicated with the family for years. One child, Tammy, is a successful translator for the U.N., idealistic and vital. The other, Josh, is 27, a brainy, jobless college grad, fat and lonely, who hides in his room and reads a lot and is jealous of his sister. They are the sort of Jews who love going to Rome on vacation, though they think the Vatican tasteless. (All that gold, and then all those beggars on the steps.) Act I sets up all this. A shock in scene 2: Josh, alone in the house, comes into the room, and hides in a sofa behind the front sofa. We see him winding something tightly around his arm. We suspect what he's getting into. But he's not: it's tefilin. He's trying to become Orthodox. This is as shocking to his parents (when they find out, which is soon) as if he were on drugs, or (I couldn't help but think) gay. His mother catches him dovening. His grandfather is revolted at seeing him in a kipa.

But the exploration of Jewish identity which this seems likely to lead to never does begin, at least not overtly, and indeed Josh is in no hurry to urge it on them. (He never suggests his parents keep a kosher kitchen. They wouldn't if he did.) The conversation (and much of the play is rather static conversation) is more often about current politics, Israel's betrayal of its socialist ideals, England's &c., the plight of the Palestinians. In Act II, Rachel's unseen mother has been dead three months, the widower is more irascible than ever, Josh's oddness is more or less accepted with a general shrug, and Tammy comes home with an Israeli boyfriend (decidedly hot, but also sweet). He is not the catalyst, though: he is the witness and outsider (like the hapless Turk in Goosepimples). The catalyst for action is the last character to arrive, the long-lost banker sister, who has just found out her mother is dead and has come wailing to the house seeking – who knows what? She is so self-involved, and the others are so unyieldingly angry with her, that we never do know (does she? It's a bravura part, and a bravura performance), but at the climax of the play, all four adults are on their feet screaming at each other (a familiar situation in Leigh) and peace is only brought upon the house when the Israeli breaks it up, shakes hands all around (irony: his good manners are stronger than those of anyone English), takes his girl and departs. (We in the audience are all wondering: why does he still want to be with her when he knows what her family is like?) His determined acknowledgment of everyone else on stage has calmed things down – for one thing, Josh is stunned by it, and then acknowledges his grandfather. Everyone lets their grudges go just a bit. (Except the mad sister, who steals a hefty slug of scotch and departs unregretted.) In the brief final scene, father and son – whom we have not seen relate before – are playing chess, the kipa forgotten along with the rest of the furshluginer business of acting, you know, like Yids, and mom is tsk-ing about accounts of New Orleans in the hurricane in the paper.

So is this about Jews who will fight about any subject but really mean: I'm in this family, and they should notice me! Or is it about getting along with your pretenses, in a Mike Leigh sort of way? I shall be very curious when the reviews and discussions come out. (If anyone bothers to say.) As my Gram used to say after just about any play (and she adored plays): I didn't really understand it, but the acting was terrific.

P.S. The pace is slow-ish, but the one thing that really disturbed me was the woman behind me who insisted on laughing enthusiastically at everything that entertained her, as if she were a TV laughtrack. No one else did this; she wouldn't stop. And it was the same laugh, the same number of beats, the same peeing on the carpet: "I'm here, don't you DARE pay attention to this play and leave me out!" She later got a grin and a nod from the actress playing Michelle, the mad sister – evidently she was a pal come to give support to the troops. She overplayed that hand. Everyone around me was irritated as hell, but none of us had the guts to confront her. What would we say? How does one handle this situation in a polite and well-bred fashion? "You're not funny; let them be funny." Doesn't wash. She's entitled to be amused by things that aren't funny if she wants to. The polite thing to do is keep your mouth shut and endure. Which we all of us did. She ran out of steam eventually – but only when her friend came on (middle of Act II), when she finally wanted to pay attention to the play I'd guess.

Opera Today

As is perhaps well known (it's not?), I write reviews for the online magazine Opera Today, which not only has its own reviewers in many locales around the world (Chicago, Istanbul) but also links to many local reviewers and furthermore provides podcast opera. Gary Hoffman, the editor, shares my taste for less than usual fare, or unfamiliar versions of the usual, and unlike some podcast providers we could mention, he does not intrude commentary narration of his own – which can be delicious once, but rather palls when one wishes to go back to this or that recording.

Gary recently asked me to suggest themes for recordings he might then acquire and put up; he is upset by the lack of crowds for his offerings. This was a tough one for me since I like his taste. (Who else in the universe has not one, not two, but three different Marschner operas in his podcast content? Admirers of Der Templar und die Judin, rejoice! Plenty of Salieri and Meyerbeer and Handel, too. Not as much out-of-the-way Donizetti or Mercadante or Rimsky-Korsakov as I'd like to hear....) Also, my taste in everything (music, travel, art, books, dance music, sexual activity) is notoriously whimsical and minority. So I'm no damn help to him in this matter.

I urge you, dear reader, to hop over and look into it. And check out my reviews while you're at it.

Time and Space and Wagner (and my apartment)

The real wealth, the thing we spend and cannot renew, is Time. Yet so much of it is wasted. (How much time did I spend dwelling on the beauty of a certain painting in a museum, vis-a-vis the amount of time I spent purchasing tickets, making reservations, packing, getting to the airport, flying to the destination, getting to a hotel, recovering from the trip, eating breakfast, seeking out the tourist office, finding my way to the museum in question. What will come to my mind when I let my mind drift, unfocused, back to the trip? Rouen Cathedral by Monet or the cab up to Montmartre? Or throwing up dinner?)

So I look around Thangorodrim East (my flat in Greenwich Village; Thangorodrim West was in Seattle) at the heaps of slag, unsorted paper, books, DVDs, VHS tapes (someone in the building just threw out 300 movies – I only took thirty I swear), clothes I never wear, and all that unplayable vinyl. There isn't Time to make proper use of it all and the Time I've got I piss away, not even writing, blaming it on depression. Stymied I tell you. And I'm not getting more of it. I've asked my broker, Catherine, what to invest in to get more Time; she had no suggestions.

More Space would be nice too. Those are the two things I really need (and self-esteem, and good conversation, and more travel): Time and Space. Space I can perhaps do something about. I gave a brunch party a couple of years back for four well-built athletic gay men; they moved my furniture around, and then I fed them. (They'd never heard of cornichons. How gay can they have been?) If I could throw things out (the VHS tapes get tossed after one viewing – except I'm keeping the Astaire-Rodgers ones; the opera DVDs get sent to Maggie in northern British Columbia for six months on average, but they do come back; I'm beginning to toss whole crannies of vinyl, much of it unplayed in twenty years; undershirts also get tossed) I might have some space. It's a small apartment, I admit. I've almost filled the Gulag-Around-the-Corner, as I call my storage closet on Vandam Street. (Things vanish to it in the dead of night, sometimes never to be heard from again, sometimes to reappear years later – hence, the Gulag – there's a painting in there that I'd love to find, but it would take two or three muscular people to find it.)

It's small, but it's New York, and it's rent stabilized, and I should be able to make it work. For one person. (Don't even think of moving in with me. Or spending a night with me.)

Reflecting on Time and Space makes me think of Act I of Parsifal. Parsifal, who hasn't said anything much except "Das weiss ich nicht" (I dunno), suddenly notices the landscape is moving although he and Gurnemanz are hardly walking at all. Gurnemanz replies (with most unusual - for him - concision), "Zum Raum wird hier die Zeit" (Here Space becomes Time). Will Berger (author of Wagner Without Tears) tells me, "He means to travel thru time is to travel thru space, so there's no need to walk in a "spiritual" place such as the land of the grail." He attributes this to a vague understanding (by Wagner) of the Rig Veda (which he'd been studying, casually), and in which a union of Time and Space in perfect godly aeon had broken down to produce the present imperfect age. Parsifal has strayed (that is, been mystically invited by the Grail itself) into the one place where the union is preserved.

This relates, perhaps, to Tolkien's Lothlorien, preserved by Galadriel's Ring from the passing of swift human time, and therefore revealing a glimpse (Tolkien's favorite word) of the Eldar Days, the golden First Age of Middle Earth. Tolkien loathed Wagner's take on Norse mythology - and even more his take on Christianity - but linguistically they connected to similar sources of lore, and the revival of ancient mythic systems was a great inspiration to both men.

Now in what ways are Time and Space equal? Space evidences the movement of Time, which otherwise we might not notice, and certainly not worry about so much. Time gives Space a scope in which to operate.

Perhaps if I moved to someplace in Queens....

Turquoise reflections

A sad reflection as 2007 draws to a close: How much more of my life (as at this very moment) has been spent doing laundry than wandering the streets of Istanbul or Venice – or even Paris. A rational man would live in Istanbul or Paris – and get someone else to do the laundry. (Volunteers?)

The Birth of an Epic?

A week ago went to War and Peace at the Met, the grandest show in New York, spectacular work in a spectacular production with a spectacular cast – decidedly a tough work to grasp on first encounter (this was my fourth such encounter, and now I get it), a wonderful night at the opera – and the theater – and the ballet – and the orchestra.

Today I listened to the live broadcast – twice, due to the magic of modern webcasting. When I was in the house, everyone was discussing whether or not we'd ever read the novel (I had, but thirty years ago), and its influence. Today, listening to the score and its four hours of easily missed exquisite detail, I found myself thinking about the book's plot, the bickering among several noble families until everyone faces national crisis, and comes through that, and lives are lost and the crisis is faced and the nation re-born and marriages transpire, happy ending.

What comes to mind very strongly is The Birth of a Nation. It seems to me plain as the nose on my face (though in fact I have a very handsome one, not as grand as Jonathan Cake's the other night in Cymbeline, but handsome) that Griffith's model was, must have been, War and Peace, point by point, even to the slaves mimicking the resigned wisdom of the serfs. I had never heard this spoke of before, am curious to see if it is a commonplace of Griffith criticism or my own discovery. (My money's on the former assumption.)

I began to think of Tolstoy's masterful construction: the two or three aristocratic families (Bolkonskys, Rostovs, Kuragins-and-Bezukhovs), the pettiness of their romantic and other involvements when the great tidal wave of national disaster rolls over them, the way the characters show their mettle in meeting it, the way their personal destinies work themselves out in a more peaceable aftermath -- and the resemblance to another work in an entirely different medium occurred to me.

Like Tolstoy, Griffith examines a couple of aristocratic families, their loyal underlings, their intertwining romances, and then hits them in the head with a shattering cataclysm that kills quite a few of them and transforms the lives and social circumstances of the rest. His very neutrality on the Civil War (and his determination to see blacks who attempt to break out of their class as contrary to the "natural") seem to grow also from Tolstoy's belief in the Russian-ness that links the class system of pre-Revolutionary Russia to a proper devotion to the Russian earth. (His racism could almost be a dreadful parody of Tolstoy's religion.) Even to the happy endings tacked on in both works after the upheavals, the story told in the American work seems to be an attempt to create the effect -- in a transAtlantic milieu -- of national epic in the manner and on the level of Tolstoy's.

For the fledgling film industry, it was an important attempt, and he chose (I believe) a significant model. But Griffith's own blindness to the evils of racism and the reality of American culture (not that Tolstoy was seeing Russia 20/20) make us uncomfortable with this relationship.

The Fourth Wall is a Two-Way Street

Friday night I attended Marlowe's Edward II, which is in previews at the Red Bull Theater Company, a little Off-Broadway outfit that won kudos (and my heart) with their hilarious, delicious, sexy, bloodthirsty run of The Revenger's Tragedy a season or two back. The plays are both Liz-Jac in era and composed in blank verse, but they are very unlike: Revenger's Tragedy is out-and-out fantasy fiction set in an Italian neverland with no motivations but lust and blood-lust ("How many people do we have to murder up here before you groundlings feel something, damn it?"), where Edward II is based, however vaguely, on actual history as found in Holinshed's Chronicles. This was a new invention, history fictionalized and versified for the stage, pretty much invented with this play and Shakespeare's contemporary Henry VI plays (whoever wrote those, and they appear, at least the first one or two, to be collaborations). (There are also Edward III, which I saw recently Off-Off-Broadway, and Edmund Ironsides – also works of c.1590 but of disputed authorship and no very great quality.)

No nation ever had done anything quite like history plays before, and no other nation with a theater scene (Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Russia, China, Japan) produced them for many centuries thereafter – even Shakespeare and Marlowe did not quite dare to hold the reigning dynasty up to the cold limelight of the stage, though Plantagenets were fair game enough. (Henry VIII was not produced until Hal's daughter, Bess, the last Tudor, was safely under a stone in the Abbey.) At Red Bull every word is clear, and every syllable is spoken as though it meant something (though I would cavil that they get the meaning wrong by a few centuries now and then), and this is a great pleasure in the staging of old plays, so I am a fan. But – perhaps because it's early in the run, perhaps because the play has been edited and rearranged to a degree with half the characters omitted and their speeches redistributed like legacies among the remainder, perhaps because it is so very different a piece – I did not totally delight in the zaniness of Edward as I had in that of Tragedy.

Among my objections to the staging (highly inventive on a minimal set) were a few that have occurred to me at other stagings of classical texts (plays and operas) in recent years: pointless updating and pointless porn. A knife is not a sword, and toy pistol is not a sword, and a submachine gun is not a sword, and if the characters keep saying they are going to stab someone or run them through or make them feel the point or edge of their steel, and then they pull out a gun and threaten them or kill them (and Red Bull is very clever in its use of hemapacks at such moments, I must say – there were gasps of horror behind me now and then from some person(s) who had not read a synopsis before buying tickets), it brings about a certain uneasiness, a certain distrust of the actors and the company in the audience that would like to fall under Marlowe's spell. (True, I can count on the fingers of one disfigured hand the number of convincing stage stabbings I've been witness to – but I've never seen a convincing stage shooting.)

My other objection – here and in many an opera and staging – is gratuitous gamy sex. Sure Queen Isabella and Mortimer were lovers – oh Lordy how they could love – but Marlowe makes it quite clear that this passion began slowly and was not consummated until shortly before they joined forces to depose her husband. (The play telescopes the events of twenty years into five acts, and it would be surprising if all the politics did make sense.) When the Queen calls him "gentle" Mortimer and "sweet" Mortimer early in the play (for one thing, in the written text these terms are often addressed to his uncle, a character deleted in this version), it is a casual mode of address in Marlowe's time, kind of like calling someone "dude" today without meaning anything at all about their style of dress – to imply, as this staging does, that she has the hots for Mort from the beginning in spite of every word she actually says (she's in love with her husband for the first three acts), makes a nonsense of the characters. Even more annoying, was having them spouting blank verse while humping all-but-bareass in mid-stage in a scene that is set in a council chamber – it leaves one flabbergasted when other characters (including Isabella's very young son) then enter the chamber without apparently noticing the semi-clothed (and dripping) state of the two persons they meet there. I don't see what this adds. We know they're screwing, we don't have to be shown it. The Archbishop of Canterbury would certainly object to being invited to watch.

I had a similar problem with the current staging of Macbeth at the Metropolitan Opera. We know the Macbeths have a good, strong, sensual marriage – they don't have to sing their every duet while horizontal to demonstrate this. For one thing, it makes vocalizing tough; for another, opera singers are not the people I want to watch doing this (or wouldn't be if I wanted to watch anyone at all – other than maybe myself and one or four other persons – doing this). For another, and a bigger, point: it adds nothing and detracts from the atmosphere. The love duet, like the pas de deux in ballet, is a conventional artistic metaphor for the sex act. We understand when they're talking, or singing, or dancing, that this is a figure-of-performance. To see them actually at it is not art – it's porn.

I realize that pornography is the most significant art form of our time, the only one that means anything to most people (I am not most people, and I don't watch porn – really, it bores me), but to inject porn into every other art form cheapens them, and in destroying the boundary between public discourse and private salaciousness, we rob porn of its joy. If we turn every artistic and dramatic situation that includes a metaphor for lovemaking into actual lovemaking, into porn, is that it will not only rob art of its point, it will rob porn of any point at all. A few years down the road, if we want sexual jollies, we'll put on a DVD of a Vivaldi or Wagner opera or a Shakespearean tragedy and turn off the sound. And then the porn industry will have nothing left to appeal to – the private world will have ceased to exist. If we give names to every nameless thrill, there goes the thrilling part of our world, polluted like every joyous beckoning mystery that used to hedge and inspire our lives.

Smyth's The Wreckers -- New, at 101

Dame Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers had its U.S. premiere in concert last Sunday at Avery Fisher Hall, thanks to the American Symphony Orchestra and the enduring passion for neglected late romantic scores of its director, Leon Botstein. The world premiere of the opera took place in Leipzig and Prague in 1906, and though not without its champions, it has largely faded from view.

Smyth had a lot of cards stacked against her -- she was a woman when no major opera had ever been composed by one (is this still true?), and English when no English-born composer had produced an unquestioned operatic masterpiece since Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. (Sullivan might have -- but his Ivanhoe and The Golden Legend suggest that light opera was not just his delight, it was also the locus of his genius.) Smyth, like Sullivan, had studied in Germany, and her second opera, Der Wald, composed to a German libretto, had (and still has) the honor of being the first and only opera composed by a woman ever to play the Met. Everyone was charmed by her ladylike demeanor (she came of good family), but the second half of the double bill -- Il Trovatore -- (there were no unions then, remember) -- swept every shred of Der Wald out of everybody's ears.

The Wreckers is set in her native England and she didn't write the libretto this time -- but the story was her idea; she did not work from a previous dramatic form, and that shows. The drama of her story is minimal, the characters clichéd, their emotions a bit too simple. They do not interest us; they do not promise more than we've already heard. The story concerns a congregation of starving fisherfolk in Cornwall who, led by their pastor, misconstrue some of the bloodier passages of the Bible to justify lighting, or putting out, coastal warning lights so that ships will be wrecked, their crews slaughtered and the town will prosper on the booty. “Probably not much tourism in that town,” someone muttered. Nowadays, of course, there probably is: tales of the Wreckers of old quaintly embossed on every tchotchke and T-shirt.

Botstein suggests that the story's attitude towards wrongheaded heterodox Christianity may make the piece more appealing nowadays, and one may also note that the heroine is denounced as a witch when convicted of thwarting the town's bloodthirsty plans -- I think what we have here is a c.1900 sentimental feminist's feelings for the witches of old. British music, women's creativity and suffrage were not the only causes ahead of -- but very much of -- her time that Smyth espoused.

To my own surprise -- I had never heard any of Smyth's music -- it was a very pleasurable afternoon. The music was at once quasi-Wagnerian and elegantly deployed (as suits a German-trained musician of the time), and tunefully old-fashioned (typical of Brits of the time). Botstein has come up with far less appealing works in his devoted endeavors -- as well as better ones, like last spring's Die Ferne Klang. The vocal lines were grateful, and the choral numbers especially effective.

The opera attempts to twine assorted love affairs into the ethical question of whether or not unknown sailors are fair game for starving coastal peasants. The Pastor and his congregation (especially bloodthirsty Avis, the fun part) thinks they are, but Thirza, the Pastor's young wife, hopes to save the sailors. Her partner in this secret deed is Mark, who falls in love with her -- which is dangerous, as Avis loves Mark and soon uncovers the details. The Pastor is unable to save them but forfeits his leadership, and the townsfolk bind Mark and Thirza in a cave as the tide comes in. This sounds more thrilling than it is: the drama is almost by-the-numbers: have we had a hymn? must be time for a folk song -- tenderly echoed by the other participant in adultery. The characters had attractive lines to sing, and obvious themes to represent, but they never came to anything like life.

Smyth lacked the knack of making fable real by deepening individual psyches – a gift Verdi, Wagner, Strauss and Britten possessed in spades, a reason their dramas ever fascinate. Even the hoariest tale, set to melody by any one of these four masters, reveals intriguing depths, individuality in short: Gilda is an ingenue, but not just an ingenue -- her spunk, the fervor behind her melody, makes us curious about her back story and her fate. Smyth’s tunes and the bare-bones libretto did not give one much notion of unspoken thoughts glimmering beneath the too-obvious surface of what people were saying, and the words themselves were far from eloquent. Smyth's inability to make cardboard human was far from unique -- most of her male contemporaries (even Richard Strauss in his first two operas) were, like her, using Wagnerian techniques and "mythic" material with similar lack of originality or theatricality. Smyth was, unfortunately, one of the boys killing time between the arrival of giants.

This was, in fact, the most interesting aspect of the event: pondering why Smyth's opera, with all its character clash, its big burning (okay, drowning) issues, its tunefulness, its steady rise to climax, remained dead on the page, without subtlety or frisson. These people have no secrets from us; we know them, and we know them in twenty seconds. There are no surprises here, and there are no questions: Did Thyrza and Mark actually, you know, do it? Who cares? (They've been debating for 220 years whether Don Giovanni had his way with Donna Anna just before curtain rise, and there's no clear answer yet. But in any good Giovanni, we still wonder.) The Wreckers is a drama without dramatics. Inventing people was not Smyth's gift.

The powerful roles are for the women – the sole sign that a lesbian (okay; bisexual woman) wrote this. The saintly Thirza, a contralto for a change, gives her life to save unknown sailors -- but she never seems to think about this, or to consider how her relationship with a man other than her husband looks to that husband and the rest of the town. Avis, the soprano, rouses the villagers against the man who has left her, against Thirza who has captivated him, and even Thirza’s husband. She seems concerned for the survival of the community's quaint customs, but it's really lust and jealousy that drive her -- and she rather wins us over by not taking any guff from her father or any other man. In a more recent opera, Avis's role would be just one long shriek, but Smyth, brighter than the post-World War II opera composers, gave her some charming music.

On Sunday, Ellie Dehn, whose name has been gathering comment on the circuit, had great fun as Avis and never seemed shrill or in any vocal trouble, while Thirza was handled gratefully by the rising mezzo Kate Aldrich. Richard Cox, after a slow start, sang an amiable sea ballad as Mark and a Tristan-esque (but not so brutal as that) dying duet with Thirza. Louis Otey was effective as the Pastor, Andrew Schroeder more than that as Avis's disappointed father (he kicks her out when he realizes what an unprincipled slut she is), Deborah Domanski charming in the trouser role of the boy Avis toys with the better to pursue Mark, and Ryan MacPherson better than promising as another fisherman. The orchestra and chorus made much of the roiling, post-Hollander sea pictures (a bit tame when one thinks of what Vaughn Williams and Britten were to do with British musical sea painting), and the orchestra had many intriguing touches to raise Smyth's nonexistent reputation.