In Review > North America
Dark Sisters
NEW YORK CITY
Gotham Chamber Opera
11/9/11
Lynch as Eliza in Gotham Chamber Opera's Dark Sisters
© Richard Termine 2012
Nico Muhly's score for his new opera Dark Sisters conjures an atmosphere of stifling oppression. The work focuses on the five "sister-wives" in a polygamous Mormon compound, all married to a stern "Prophet" who uses the language of righteousness to hold them in fearful bondage. The orchestral argument, advanced by a thirteen-piece, one-to-a-part chamber ensemble, consists predominantly of spare, droned chords that suggest the wide-spaced harmonies of Copland in his "prairie mode" — but the settlers here have long ago reached the frontier and found it to be a prison. Against this austere backdrop, the female voices, alternatively blending and clashing with each other, create an estrogenic texture carrying more than a hint of incipient hysteria.
Despite the evocative quality of its sonic palette, Dark Sisters — as seen at its November 9 world premiere, given by Gotham Chamber Opera at John Jay College — is not a successful work. Neither Muhly nor his librettist, Stephen Karam, has found the means to bring the situation to theatrical life. For much of its length, Dark Sisters seems like a well-designed setting for a drama that hasn't yet been created.
The opera continually presents plot gambits, then ignores them. The curtain rises just after state officials have raided the compound and taken all the women's children into custody. But this crisis is brushed aside for several long scenes in which the sister-wives — starting with Eliza, the opera's heroine — reveal their backstories in confessional set pieces. By now thoroughly beached as a piece of drama, Dark Sisters stumbles upon another predicament: Eliza learns with horror that her teenage daughter, Lucinda, has been promised to a fifty-six-year-old church elder. This seems unrelated to the raid; it isn't even clear whether Lucinda is one of the missing children. In order to garner the Prophet's trust while planning an escape, Eliza lures him into her bed at the Act I curtain.
Act II opens with a television broadcast, led by a sensation-seeking newscaster who grills the women about the raid. Here, Eliza does achieve her liberation: she entreats her "sisters" to break free, then herself flees the community. But her outburst has nothing to do with her scheming in the previous act. One might expect to follow the fate of the work's central figure after this defining act, but instead the opera attends to Ruth, the most troubled of the wives, who has broken down in hysteria during the broadcast and now dives off a mesa, slathering another coat of sadness onto the proceedings. Eliza reappears at Ruth's funeral and tries to persuade Lucinda to leave with her, but the girl, thoroughly inculcated in the belief system of her upbringing, refuses to follow.
The work's shortcomings as drama aren't entirely due to its libretto. Muhly has written a score in which not much happens. The vocal writing is especially flavorless, most often conforming to the cadences of speech without really presenting a melodic contour of its own. The same protest might be leveled against John Adams in his operas, but Adams sets his vocal lines against an orchestral fabric much livelier and more varied than Muhly's. The stasis of Dark Sisters' music — the element that's most effective in portraying the women's imprisoned state — is also its chief theatrical weakness.
The disappointments of the evening cannot be blamed on the performance. The singers were not only fine in and of themselves but truly well cast — an indication of the stupendous talent pool a resourceful American company can draw upon. I wasn't especially taken with the soundof most of these voices — the women, in common with so many American singers of their generation, had upper ranges cultivated to pierce the heavens. (I must quickly make an exception for Margaret Lattimore's butterscotch-y mezzo.) But under Rebecca Taichman's direction, all held the stage as actors. The words emerged expressively, movingly, and the performers' faces revealed the wretchedness of their situation.
Caitlin Lynch was like an operatic Laura Linney, projecting Eliza's inner strength as well as her aching vulnerability. The estimable Jennifer Check played Almera, who relates how her mother prayed for death — not just her own, but her daughter's — as a release from the repressive plural-marriage system. In Check's performance, one could discern the character's clear-eyed apprehension of her fate and her passive acquiescence to it. Eve Gigliotti sang Ruth with a hint of chalk in her voice that foreshadowed the unfortunate woman's doom from the start.
One of Jennifer Zetlan's great strengths is her physiognomy. Her button-like eyes could be read anywhere in the theater. But this very gift occasionally led her afoul: when she worked at animating her responses, this intelligent singer risked turning the do-good Zina into a cartoon. I didn't hear much that was childlike in the soft-grained lyric soprano Kristina Bachrach brought to the role of Lucinda, but perhaps that was intentional: the girl may be just a teenager, but she is facing the responsibilities and worries of a woman. Kevin Burdette was scarily self-righteous as the Prophet and appropriately smarmy as the newscaster who provokes Eliza's outburst.
The somber, simple sets, using video projections to create much of their effect, were the work of Leo Warner and Fifty Nine Productions. Gotham Chamber Opera's artistic director, Neal Goren, led a fine pick-up band. The opera got a fair shake here; Gotham's forces presented it with a musical and theatrical polish that could hardly be improved upon. But they did not succeed in turning Dark Sisters into an effective piece of musical theater. 
FRED COHN
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