Imagine, if you will, a romantic comedy of the original women’s rights movement, incorporating deconstructions of 19th century political rhetoric, set in an operatic mode mixing Pirates of Penzance with Dido and Aeneas, with music based on Stephen Foster, and American hymns.
I’ve been waiting to see and hear Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thompson’s Mother of Us All for about 40 years, so I didn’t miss Opera UCLA’s performance last Tuesday. It was a brilliant, funny, disturbing and moving production. I gather UCLA did it in 1965, with sets by David Hilberman. I left wondering why it isn’t produced all the time.
It’s Stein’s later mode, so there are characters, a sense of narrative progression, and the characters speak sentences, though their sentences play with sense more than assert earnestly. The meanings go in and out of focus – appropriate for dealing with politics. One witty touch was to provide supertitles, projecting bits of Stein’s text. It was a sign that director Michael Hackett knew his material. For all the amiable nonsense, there were some jarringly pertinent lines.
I suspect it will always seem topical – sexism, racism, public discourse, the constitution – but it seemed especially so the other night, “… because they are afraid of black men because they are afraid of women because they are afraid afraid. Men are afraid.”
Thompson’s music is the perfect foil to the text. Instead of knotty, it’s easy-going and tuneful. It delineates characters and scenes with elegant efficiency. Thompson provides an outline for some of Stein’s more freeform passages. There are elaborate instrumental interludes providing additional layers. Thompson is even more underappreciated than Stein, if that’s possible. Andreas Mitisek, the magician of Long Beach Opera, kept the music on target.
The action consists of seven scenes of Susan B. Anthony’s life, in which she lectures, resists, debates, dreams about or laughs affectionately at an inner circle of mostly fictional women and mostly historical men, plus a chorus of Suffragettes. It ends with an epilogue where the characters pay their respects to her statue on a pedestal in the Capitol, while her spirit looks down and wonders.
The whole opera is about people getting up onto, and down off of, pedestals.
Some – most of the men – are fanatical about maintaining their prominence. In the fourth scene there’s a male trio singing “We you see we V.I.P. very important persons to anyone who can hear or you can see just we three.” Garrett Schoonover gave Daniel Webster an impressively solemn voice and presence.
But none remain steady on their pedestals. Webster finds his Angel More. And Mario Arias found the ridiculousness of the John Adams character, constantly reminding poor Constance Fletcher of what an honor it is to be loved by an Adams.
Hackett gave everyone on stage a characteristic walk, a stance, a look and gesture. Though Susan B. dominates, Thompson’s music gives everyone a moment in the spotlight, and the students had a ball with it.
Even characters without much music made an impression:
Vanessa Martucci’s Angel More doesn’t sing very much, but she pulled off a way of carrying herself that was mesmerizing. Likewise Jacelyn Yeo did a memorable (literal) star turn as Lillian Russell, swanning around stage in a queenly manner. Ulysses S. Grant isn’t a big part, but Michael Valentekovic mimed rages that were hilarious.
Thompson made the role Susan B. a challenge, and Maureen Brabec pulled it off. She nailed the finale, “We cannot retrace our steps,” which is the work’s analogy to Dido's "Remember me". It was shattering.
Intermittently interrupting the proceedings is Jo the Loiterer, a not noble, idealistic, upstanding citizen. Other than Alice B. Toklas, he’s the most compelling character Stein ever invented. I suspect Jo’s a distillation of the irreverent G.I.s Stein delighted in after WWII. Eric Levintow perfectly embodied Jo's clowning, his funks, and surprisingly tender lyric tenor sighs. Under the table or sprawled on the floor, he was definitely not on any pedestal.
The big comic surprise – when Indiana Elliott’s brother forbids her marriage to Jo - was beautifully perpetrated by Dominic Delzompo, parodying a dozen other operas in authentic Gilbert & Sullivan style: “Nobody knows who I am but I forbid the marriage”.
Irena Jacobs’s sets defined interior and outside spaces with elegant austerity. Their minimalism was contrasted by the exuberant maximalism of Maddison Caroll’s 19th century pastiche costumes. UCLA went all out, and it was worth it.
