Opera Finds A Faltering Voice

Art is undeniably a powerful medium for the raising of social consciousness. Whether it be in theater, dance, music, or framed upon a wall, art captures the attention of a viewer fully and provides an excellent place to raise awareness of important issues. AIDS, in our age, is obviously an important issue.

America reaches only now the end of the first decade of the AIDS epidemic. More people each day are touched by the effects of AIDS, but we, as an audience and as a country, still feel distanced from the disease and its victims. We have not yet learned to understand the pain of the diagnosis, of living and dying with AIDS.

Adams House, last Friday, offered its Lower Common Room as a forum for the treatment of AIDS through art--through opera, more specifically. Territories, an improvisational opera in one act, focuses on a relationship between two women, an AIDS patient and her nurse. It is a story of fear of loneliness, isolation and death, and it is a story of the over-burdened medical professional struggling with its impotence--themes inextricably linked with AIDS.

We find young and pretty Alex the embodiment of a victim of AIDS, alone and afraid. Her sister and her best friend Sam are too busy to come visit her. She finds comfort in the development of a friendship with Louise, her nurse. Louise, overworked and under pressure from the head doctor to take better care of the patients, is torn between helping Alex and sparing herself the hurt that inevitably comes of emotional investment in a dying patient.

The work is certainly meant to be experimental, and the set is powerful in that it places the audience in a sterile, foreign world. The set consists of three lamps, a piano, and a bed. Black plastic, splattered with red paint, stretches across the floors, the walls, and the furniture. A clear plastic sheet serves as the patient's bedsheets. The set, probably unintentionally, reinforces our distance from Alex and inhibits our empathy.

Two actresses play five characters. Cheri Magnello plays Louise, the over-worked nurse; Andrea, a lawyer; and Sam, a painter. Victoria Pittman plays Alex and Dr. Emily Bernstein, an over-worked physician. The two succeed in avoiding confusion by making large changes of character and small changes of costume. The nurse grasps a briefcase to become a lawyer, a paintbrush to become a painter. Though Magnello and Pittman are convincing in each of their roles, in the quick changes, they often need more than a moment to find their new characters.

The tone of dialogue is informal, conversational. The lyrics, though original, are often heavy-handed. Lines like, "Listen to me, please, stop looking at your clipboard," and "Please bring me a Coke" are sung in a style of opera rarely heard. The lines succeed in making this opera accessible. In glimpses of the performance, the audience senses the unique tenderness of the relationship between nurse and patient. In glimpses, we feel the fragility of life.

There is potential for Territories to be an intensely powerful show. The ideas are fresh, the issues pressing. Magnello and Pittman both have excellent voices and succeed in making comfortable an audience unused to opera.

For the most part, however, the performance fails to engage. Because of a weakness in characterization the audience cannot cross the barrier between the worlds of the healthy and the dying. We do not learn who Alex is, where she comes from, or how she got AIDS. She remains the anonymous victim of a disease we don't understand--she borders on the stereotypical. The audience maintains the detachment they entered with, never feeling the terror of a person's approaching death.

It is impossible to evaluate the piece solely as a work of art, ignoring its social context. The show was a production of the New Opera Theater Ensemble (NOTE), a company founded in May of 1988 to promote the use of opera as a forum for treating contemporary social issues. The company, directed by Roland B. Tec '88, uses an experimental improvisational rehearsal process in which material is generated, then edited and shaped.

NOTE is a noble endeavor. The concept is excellent, and the group's members have the energy and creativity to make it work. Their goals are as large as the subject matter they aim to address. They assume then a heavy burden which is made heavier when they feel obliged to buck dramatic conventions and traditional media. In its extremity of experimentation, the production fails at times to bridge the distance between the audience and the drama, though it does raise awareness and stimulate some campus discussion about AIDS.

Contemporary social issues need a voice, and that of art can speak most loudly. But artists should not be so enraptured by the beauty of their own voices that they forget the importance of their message.