In opera's brave new world, there's no balm in Gilead
By JOHN FLEMING
Published June 8, 2003
ST. PAUL, Minn. - It's just a few years from now and an earthquake has destroyed nuclear power plants in California. Famine grips the country. AIDS has reached epidemic proportions. Twisted Sister plays Carnegie Hall. The president and members of Congress have been assassinated.
Welcome to the Republic of Gilead, formerly the United States, a Christian fundamentalist police state, run by men. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are capital crimes. Women are classified according to their duties: housekeepers called Marthas, stern monitor aunts, privileged wives, worker econowives.
Industrial pollution and radiation have made most women infertile, giving rise to a class called the handmaids, after a figure in Genesis. They are required to breed with the ruling commanders, whose names they assume. For example, Offred, or "of Fred," is the handmaid of Fred; Ofglen, "of Glen," and so on.
This nightmarish scenario is the setting for The Handmaid's Tale, an opera by Danish composer Poul Ruders that had its North American premiere in five performances in May by the Minnesota Opera. Based on Margaret Atwood's 1986 novel about a feminist dystopia, and adapted in the libretto of English writer Paul Bentley, it was not only one of the musical events of the year but also a telling piece of political theater.
Atwood, a Canadian, was in the Twin Cities for opening night at the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts in downtown St. Paul. She wrote her novel as a cautionary response to the rise of the Moral Majority, as well as to Islamic antifemale regimes in Iran and Afghanistan. As she pointed out in a recent essay, the opera has taken on even more relevance since its world premiere in Copenhagen in 2000.
"Three years later - after 9/11, after the coming of right-wing religious ideology to the White House and, most importantly, after the erosion of constitutional rights of many kinds - this piece seems eerily prescient," the novelist wrote.
"In The Handmaid's Tale, the eye from the American dollar bill is used as a logo by the Gilead secret police, who control people through credit-card information. It's the same eye just adopted by the Homeland Security folks, who can now, yes, control people through credit-card information."
Atwood has become the successor to Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, with her propensity for futuristic tales of woe. Her latest novel, Oryx and Crake, just published, is about the aftermath of a genetically engineered apocalypse.
Needless to say, given its subject matter, The Handmaid's Tale was far from subtle, but the polemics were largely downplayed in the Minnesota production by Eric Simonson (director), Robert Israel (sets and costumes) and Robert Wierzel (lighting). They had their hands full just keeping the narrative on track, since the opera is organized into about 40 scenes, sometimes quite brief, that flash backward and forward among three time periods.
The staging had its clunky elements, such as a black wall that rolled across the rear of the stage to delineate scene changes and a boxy structure that served as the handmaids' garret and other areas of the commander's house. In a departure from the Atwood novel, the handmaids wore drab outfits instead of bright red uniforms.
Interestingly, Ruders and Bentley originally wrote the work in English, then translated it into Danish for the performances in Copenhagen, where it was called Tjenerindens Fortaelling. The Minnesota production was sung in English with supertitles.
Mezzo-soprano Elizabeth Bishop was handmaid Offred, the heroine of the work, and she gave a brilliant performance, which was all the more moving for the sense of emotional restraint she brought to her chilling story.
"What I feel is emptiness. What I feel is that I must not feel," she sang in an early scene, coming upon the hooded, orange-clad body of a dissident executed by the government. By the end of the three-hour opera, an upstage wall was covered by hanged bodies.
Even an impressionistic, poetic aria to the menstrual cycle ("Every moon I watch for blood"), sung by Offred in a doctor's examining room, seemed right in Bishop's intelligent portrayal.
In one of the score's most inventive devices, Offred sometimes confronted her prehandmaid self, "young Offred in the Time Before" (mezzo-soprano Megan Dey-Toth), by way of flashbacks signaled by chirpy minimalist arpeggios. Passionately effective was the unison duet in which they mourned the disappearance of a 5-year-old daughter, taken into custody by authorities because of Offred's adulterous affair.
Ruders makes skillful use of quotation, employing Amazing Grace in various permutations as a motif for the relationship between Offred and her commander's barren wife, a former gospel singer named Serena Joy (mezzo-soprano Joyce Castle). He also works in some Bach with a fragment of the love song Bist du bei mir, heard as storm troopers take Offred's child away.
The orchestral writing is tremendous, from slithery harmonics in the strings to violent brass and percussion at climactic moments. With the colorful texture he draws from the orchestra, which includes electronic instruments, Ruders has been called the "Richard Strauss of the computer-age orchestra." Unfortunately, the Minnesota performance, conducted by Antony Walker, didn't have the sonic punch evident from the recording on the Da Capo label of the Royal Danish Opera production.
Naturally, given the bleakness of the story, a lot of the music is dissonant, but Ruders has a wicked wit that lightens the mood from time to time, such as the jangly parody of lounge music that introduced a scene in Jezebel's, a sort of Playboy Club where the commanders go to let their hair down. A tango violin solo plays as Offred changes into a little black party dress given to her by the commander.
In an opera dominated by women, bass Gabor Andrasy was a standout as Offred's commander, a creepy character, to be sure, but not without vulnerabilities as he seduced the handmaid with forbidden pleasures Scrabble and copies of Vogue.
During the monthly breeding ritual, as Andrasy's commander lay between Offred's legs, and she, with her skirt hitched up, lay between the fully clothed Serena Joy's legs, there was a walkout or two in the audience at the performance I attended, and that seemed only right. If you can't get a few people scandalized by such a lurid episode, then you probably haven't done your job in staging a daring new work.
Minnesota Opera was unable to line up a corporate sponsor for The Handmaid's Tale, no surprise considering the content, and it deserves a lot of credit for bucking the conservative climate in the arts. It will be interesting to see if any other U.S. company has the courage to produce this opera for our troubled time.
