Risks can keep arts exciting
By Andrew Adler • aadler@courier-journal.com • November 15, 2009
Overheard during intermission at the opening night of “Of Mice and Men” at Kentucky Opera:
Man A: So, how do you like it?
Man B: Well, it's different.
Man A: I was at “La Traviata” and compared to that, this is culture shock.
Culture shock? Were we attending the same performance? How could Carlisle Floyd's opera, now 40 years old and based on one of the best-known short novels of the 20th century, be regarded as anything but the safest of the safe? Is there really that much aesthetic distance between Verdi's fallen woman and Floyd's desperate itinerants, George and Lennie?
Apparently so. Opera patrons, whether in New York City or Louisville, are notorious for the narrowness of their tastes. Veer away from the top dozen works in the standard repertory, and listeners are apt to grumble.
I find that a depressing sort of reality. Indeed, when Kentucky Opera general director David Roth went on and on in his curtain speech about how his company was taking risks with a production like “Of Mice and Men,” I wanted to jump up and shout, “You call this a risk?”
The sad thing was that Roth was quite serious. But could you imagine what would happen if he dared stage something genuinely challenging? If Kentucky Opera could reach back all the way to 1922 and present Alban Berg's “Wozzeck” — a landmark of 20th-century opera and a long-acknowledged masterwork — there'd be a rebellion.
Nonetheless, I firmly believe that without genuine aesthetic risk, there isn't a whole lot of point to keeping an enterprise going. I don't mean this to sound too hard, but at some juncture you've got to take a stand and persuade your constituency to trust your judgment.
“Of Mice and Men” is a fine place to begin. The opera has stature, and so did the performance I attended. It acknowledged an entire set of American expressive traditions: musical, literary and theatrical. It didn't need star singers or glitzy scenery to make its points.
If I were looking for the next “contemporary” American opera to produce at the Brown, I'd zero in on Tobias Picker's “Emmeline,” a superlative work first performed in 1996 at Santa Fe Opera. No, it's not a light comedy. But it's wonderful — culture shock of the most satisfying kind.
Roth regards the Brown an ideal place to perform works that depend on close-in theatricality. Because it brings patrons close to the stage, it is a setting in which potentially difficult pieces may become absorbing and inviting. If risk is to be embraced and not avoided, this is the place to declare, “We can, and we will.”
Reporter Andrew Adler can be reached at (502) 582-4668.
