United States Jason Cady, This Is Not About Natalie, Anna Heflin, The INcomplete Cosmicomics: Sarah Daniels (soprano and guitar), Aaron Wolff (actor and cello). Experiments in Opera, The Tank, New York, 22.3.2025. (RP)
Production:
Costumes – Krista Intranuovo Pineman
Sound – Travis Just
Lighting – Celia Krefter
Casts:
This Is Not About Natalie
Kris – Sarah Daniels
The INcomplete Cosmicomics
Qfwfq – Aaron Wolff
Contrast was the name of the game in the two solo operas presented by Experiments in Opera at The Tank. Jason Cady’s This Is Not About Natalie and Anna Heflin’s The INcomplete Cosmicomics are not the sort of operas that one will ever experience at the Metropolitan Opera. That is the point, as EIO likes to push the envelope rather than fit into a mold
Even the performing space has a story to tell. In the heart of Midtown Manhattan, The Tank provides a cost-free venue for artists across a variety of disciplines, including theater, dance, film and music. EIO performed in the 56-seat, black-box space, so intimacy was a given. A cool, creative vibe oozed from the building’s pores. EIO and The Tank were a perfect fit.
Jason Cady wrote the libretto and music for This is Not About Natalie. He stretches the notion of solo opera a bit, since Sunny, a ventriloquist’s dummy, is too real a presence to be dismissed. The human is singer/songwriter Kris, who was once half of an underground duo with Natalie. The act has dissolved, and Natalie is now a star as a solo performer. Kris, just a little green with envy, is struggling to pay the bills and tenaciously clinging to not having compromised her values by selling out. It seems no one made her an offer.
Kris is posting a daily video of her singing a new song preceded by some back and forth with Sunny, who also serves as confident, therapist and reality check. The videos are equal parts self-promotion, confessional and a cry for attention. Kris counts the likes and despairs over the haters, but she really wants to know if Natalie is watching. The answer comes when the number of clicks start climbing, and Natalie reaches out to her. Recognition on her terms makes the prospect of making money awfully sweet.
The multi-talented Sarah Daniels, who was terrific as the title character in EIO’s Chunky in Heat (click here) in 2019, literally rocks it as Kris. Doing triple duty as singer, guitarist and ventriloquist, Daniels masks Kris’s emotional fragility with a veneer of pride that is already starting to fray around the edges. Sunny is a bit of an opera singer, so Daniels tosses off some coloratura and the like. She is even better performing Kris’s soul-baring pop songs.
Cady scored This Is Not About Natalie for electric guitar, modular synthesizer, synthesizer bass and a drum machine. It is a mix that can be extraordinary complex or as smooth as a pop ballad, which suits the character whom he created. Kris is talented, self-absorbed and a survivor: the portrait of any artist with ambition and a dream.
There is next to no singing in Anna Heflin’s The INcomplete Cosmicomics which features a mystical entity named Qfwfq and his cello. Heflin was inspired to write her opera by the twentieth-century Italian writer Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics, a collection of twelve short stories published in 1965. Qfwfq narrates ten of the stories, which take a scientific phenomenon and creates a story from it linking to an event in the history of the universe.
The premise of Heflin’s story is that Qfwfq has been stuck in a void for thousands of years. If he exits the void, he faces a choice to either simultaneously perceive all time as a fractured being or destroy linear time and the self along with it. Heflin advises that no knowledge of Calvino’s Cosmicomics is necessary – everyone is on an equal footing. That is a good thing as much of what Qfwfq expresses in words, whether spoke or sung, is incomprehensible.
There is a surprise digression about the twentieth-century American composer Morton Feldman. Qfwfq dismissed Luciano Berio as a subject for study, as the Italian composer had already worked with Calvino on a musical drama La vera storia. Feldman experimented with time and duration in his music and, as Qfwfq observes, he had so much time when it simultaneously did not exist. It may sound like gibberish, but Heflin’s creation was engrossing. It is something to experience, not comprehend.
Qfwfq was Aaron Wolff, a Juilliard-trained cellist and winner of prestigious solo competitions, for whom Heflin created the work. Acting is his side hustle. Wolff captured the dreamy otherworldliness of Qfwfq through the potent combination of feral personality, wit and earthy sensuality. Wolff’s Qfwfq bewitches through his voice, not with the meaning of the words that trip off his tongue. He is far more eloquent when playing the cello – Qfwfq bares his soul and expresses his dreams through music, just as Kris had on her YouTube videos.
Rick Perdian