United States Poul Ruders, The Handmaid’s Tale: Soloists, Chorus and Orchestra of San Francisco Opera / Karen Kamensek (conductor). War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco, 14.9.2024. (HS)
We are living in a golden era of new opera. Recent years have produced a slew of twenty first-century works centered on topics that speak to our times. At San Francisco Opera alone, this decade brought several. Kaija Saariaho’s Innocence addressed gun violence; Rhiannon Giddens’s Omar explored the roots of racism; Mason Bates’s The (R)evoltion of Steve Jobs touched on what our attachment to computer devices can do to our lives.
A flash point in the current campaign for president of the United States is the erosion of reproductive rights for women. The Handmaid’s Tale, in an ambitious setting by composer Poul Ruders and librettist Paul Bentley, made its West Coast debut Saturday evening at the War Memorial Opera House. It is based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel in which a totalitarian state called Gilead has supplanted the United States government with a militant, patriarchal society. Women have lost their freedoms. The Handmaids undergo ritualized rapes to produce babies.
Royal Danish Theatre in Copenhagen commissioned the opera and debuted it in 2000. The revival, a co-production with San Francisco Opera, does away with a prologue and epilogue that framed the story as a historical report in both Atwood’s book and the original opera, shortening the evening and dropping the audience right into Offred’s perspective. It was in rehearsals for a March 2020 debut in Copenhagen when the pandemic intervened, scuttling the California debut in October 2020.
The gut-wrenching story packed a wallop, and so did the score. The music weaves familiar elements into a general aura of dissonance, and plainchant and hymn underline the quasi-religious aspects of the dystopian realm of Gilead. The persistent dissonance conjures the uneasiness that the characters feel in a society which displays the bodies of its hanged transgressors on a public wall for all to see.
The cast delivered solo moments and scenes with forthright intensity: much of it is full-voiced, even strident. That may serve the story’s depiction of dehumanization and fear, but it can become wearisome over the evening. Ruders insinuates references to ‘Amazing Grace’ at critical moments and piles up harmonies and musical gestures into towering constructions. He uses this musical material with genius.
The opera opens with Offred, the titular Handmaid, alone on stage, singing quietly that she is going to tell us her story even if she can only remember it in fragments. The music builds, and over three hours the memories piece together in more than 30 scenes. It finishes with Offred, again alone on the stage, facing an uncertain turning point. The music slows to a series of chords from the orchestra, the last one an ambiguous mixture of major and minor. In between, though, the language is filled with dread.
The cast, none of whom were in the Copenhagen performances, is strong both vocally and dramatically. In the opening performance, mezzo-soprano Irene Roberts was the hard-working star. She is onstage for most of the opera and wielded a voice of tireless suppleness and a physical presence that carried scene after scene. As her younger self in flashbacks, mezzo-soprano Simone McIntosh looked and sounded enough like Roberts to be believable, although more animated than the worn-down Offred. Their voices paired nicely in a touching duet late in the second act when Offred finally realizes she must confront who she was before Gilead.
The standouts included Lindsay Ammann, whose burnished mezzo-soprano suited her role as Serena Joy, a gospel singer in a mega-church in the Before Times, now the barren wife to whom Offred is assigned. As her husband, known only as Offred’s Commander, bass John Relyea wielded a dark, sturdy sound to great effect. Contralto Sara Couden as Rita, a housemaid who takes care of Offred, lent a deeper tone to the mezzos around her, and tenor Brenton Ryan brought a debonair cast to Nick, the family’s driver who is asked to get Offred pregnant when the Commander comes up short. Tenor Matthew DiBattista, the only member of the cast who has been in other productions of this opera, made the most of his creepy turn as an obstetrician who offers to get Offred pregnant himself.
There is a lot more to the complicated story, and the libretto manages to keep things clear even as flashback scenes cut back and forth with Offred’s Gilead timeline.
The orchestra of 79 musicians and 71 singers (including chorus) rose to the occasion brilliantly. Corralling the complex score was conductor Karen Kamensek, known for her work with contemporary composers. (She led the Metropolitan Opera’s Live in HD performance of Philip Glass’s Akhnaten).
Director John Fulljames’s staging pulled this together brilliantly. His creative team, all of whom were involved in the Copenhagen revival, included set designer Chloe Lamford (whose rotating building also struck an ideal atmosphere for Innocence earlier this year). Scene changes were made by rolling chairs, bleachers and desks quickly on and off the stage, and walls of corrugated steel or windows dropped down. Chiaroscuro lighting by Fabiana Piccioli created haunting accents. Sound designer Rick Jacobsohn managed to amplify the singers and create unobtrusive balances with the orchestra.
There is no denying that The Handmaid’s Tale delivers an impact, with impressive performances from all sides. The music, however, written in the waning years of the previous century, relies on more dissonance than most of this composer’s other music does. That may be the point. But at the ending, I was left dry-eyed.
Dynamics softened some of it at times, as did the recognizable tunes he mixed in. But opportunities were missed for characters to go lyrical to express their emotions in arias, as Saariaho did in Innocence even with her own dissonant musical style. So did Giddens in Omar and Bates in Steve Jobs, in less dissonant musical language. This ability to make the music connect with audiences, with or without dissonance, is a hallmark of the recent upswing of contemporary operas such as those.
Harvey Steiman
Production:
Libretto – Paul Bentley
Director – John Fulljames
Associate director – Lucy Bradley
Sets – Chloe Lamford
Costumes – Christina Cunningham
Lighting – Fabiana Piccioli
Projection – Will Duke
Sound – Rick Jacobsohn
Movement director – Colm Seery
Chorus director – John Keene
Cast:
Offred – Irene Roberts
Serena Joy – Lindsay Ammann
Rita – Sara Couden
Aunt Lydia – Sarah Cambridge
Janine / Ofwarren – Katrina Galka
Moira – Caroline Corrales
Offred Double – Simone McIntosh
Offred’s Commander – John Relyea
Doctor – Matthew DiBattista
Nick – Brenton Ryan
Luke – Christopher Oglesby
With Sylvie Jensen (Moira’s Aunt), Chester Pidduck (Guard), Courtney Miller (Warren’s Wife), Gabrielle Beteag (Offred’s Mother), Kevin Gino (Commander X), Nikola Printz (New Ofglen)