Silverlake Blvd.

Every Force Evolves a Form

 

"When Michael Faraday was working on electrolysis, he needed, as all scientists need, words.

What Faraday did was walk across campus to consult the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, the vastly accomplished Dr. William Whewell.

And Whewell would say, 'You ought to make these words out of Greek.'

Between them they came up with ion, electrode, anode, cathode.

The ghost of Heraclitus attended these sessions. He had said you can go either way on a road, up it or down it, anna the hodos or kata the hodos, contracting into anodos and kathodos.

One would like to hear these conversations, the continuation of Adam's naming the animals.”

 

[Image: Franz Kline, 1955]

 

 

 

The Charterhouse of Parma

 

“Fabrizio completely forgot to be miserable.” / “Fabrice oubliait complètement d'être malheureux.”

 

[Image: Miró, detail of Constellation Poetess, 1940]

 

Medea @ Long Beach Opera

LBO’s venue wasn’t the big theater on the beach, but The Expo Building—an abandoned department store in the Bixby Knolls neighborhood.

 

The stage was a platform elevated above chairs on all sides—like a boxing ring. Exposed ducts and wiring. Mismatched thrift-shop sofas in the lobby. Porta-Potties in the parking lot.

 

I loved it: it was like going into Chicago circa 1978 to see performance art.

 

And indeed the show was more like performance art than Grand Opera. All seven singers got up on the platform and stayed there the whole show. When they weren’t performing, they reclined, as if sleeping. Poor Ani Maldjian had to spend most of the evening supine, since Dirce disappeared after the first two scenes.

 

What they performed was Luigi Cherubini’s 1797 opera boiled down by director/conductor Andreas Mitisek and Suzan Hanson (Medea) to 10 scenes, 100 minutes with no intermission.

 

Ryan MacPherson was a pretty, self-absorbed, empty-headed Jason

 

As Jason’s fiancée Dirce, Ani Maldjian made the most of the part by stomping around the stage in huge heels waving a bottle of booze celebutant-style, and letting rip a show-stopping aria.

 

Neris was a tiny part, but Peabody Southwell made a big impression. In the final scene she was terrifying, slathering her face with blood as she described Medea’s rampage.

 

What to make of Suzan Hanson’s Medea? She presented, very nakedly, a woman who has been abandoned, and who insists on being recognized, being seen. The need for Jason to acknowledge her is so all-consuming that she is willing to commit horrible crimes. If he is no longer willing to look at her with love, then at least she can compel him to look at her with fear.

 

Cherubini’s music makes all this vivid and inescapable. It was quite a difference from the 2009 UCLA production of Medea, in which Annette Bening did not succeed in being truly frightening.

 

Mitisek’s pre-performance talk stressed Beethoven’s enthusiasm for the work, and that was a good clue. The music is varied. It is not all Terror. It doesn’t give away the ending. There are happy love duets, impressive marches, shows of pomp. But in the end, it articulates a battle between Medea and Jason. I imagine this stripped-down version eliminated a lot of incidental decoration. The ten scenes were a march straight in Hell.

 

[Image: detail of Medea by Charles-Antoine Coypel (1694-1752)]