“Lucidity” premiere offers worthy music and baffling staging at On Site Opera
On Site Opera gave the world premiere of Laura Kaminsky’s Lucidity on Thursday evening at the Abrons Arts Center in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. It’s a hot ticket with all three remaining New York performances sold out, before the production opens at Seattle Opera next week.
Kaminsky is known for tackling thorny social issues in her works. In As One, her first opera in 2014, the subject was about a transgender person’s search for self-identity. In Lucidity, the subject is Alzheimer’s disease. The topic is one reason that the opera is getting so much attention, but Kaminsky and her librettist David Cote pack a lot more hot-button issues into the plot.
Lili is a retired singer and voice teacher, who also dabbled as a composer. She lives with her son Dante, whom she adopted after his parents were killed in a car accident. The boy was a prodigy of sorts, who not only traveled with Lili on tour, but also served as her accompanist in recital. Now, he is her caregiver, lamenting a stolen childhood, more than having forsaken the piano long ago. He believes that a black man had limited options in the classical music sphere, quipping that there has only been one André Watts.
Clarinetist Sunny bursts into their lives to assist in a research project on music and memory. It’s a side hustle to fund her musical ambitions, as she has no support, either emotionally or financially, from her conservative religious parents.
Dr. Claire Klugman’s interest in Lili, however, goes beyond the clinical. Claire studied voice with Lili at the conservatory, but simply vanished from the music world after her senior recital, opting for marriage and a career in science. The former didn’t work out, but her career in science has been deeply rewarding. Claire has no regrets over her choice, only about cutting off all contact with her cherished teacher.
For all of the focus on Lili and her disease, in reality Lucidity is a story about choices made and their consequences. Ironically, the only person with no options at present is the 80-year-old Lili, who fears a descent into darkness from which she will not return. Sunny hits upon Schubert’s “Der Hirt auf dem Felsen,” which Lili recorded, as a means to create a connection with Lili. The music prompts not only Lili’s memory, but also zeroes in on the dilemmas faced by Dante, Sunny, and Claire. For as Dante observes, the echo that the shepherd hears is not the problem – silence would be far worse.
On Site Opera is known for presenting site-specific operas in non-traditional venues. Productions such as Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors, performed in a soup kitchen, and Ricky Ian Gordon’s Morning Star, a story about an immigrant Jewish family, presented in a synagogue hit the mark. Director Sarah Meyers’ staging Lucidity in a theater just doesn’t bring anything site-specific to the equation.
The setting itself was not the issue, but rather the choice to seat the audience at the rear of the stage with scenes taking place throughout the theater. The more intimate scenes are staged center stage, as traditional as can be, but focus is constantly shifting and the dramatic flow interrupted. Percussionist Brandon Williams drew attention away from the singers with his mesmerizing playing on the marimba and vibraphone simply because he was in full view.
Kaminsky’s score is colorful and expressive. She deftly weaves the clarinet solo from the Schubert into the musical fabric. Her writing for the voice shows careful attention to text and emotion. The ability to write an aria is an increasingly rare skill in a contemporary opera composer’s tool box, but Kaminsky can do it. The best was the one she composed for Sunny, in which the young woman poured out her heart over her choice of career over motherhood and the estrangement from her parents.
If the subject matter was one reason for the interest in Lucidity, the appearance of Lucy Shelton as Lili was another. Renowned for her performances of contemporary music, Shelton made a belated entrance into the world of grand opera in 2021 in Kaija Saariaho’s last opera Innocence. At 80, Shelton’s voice is just as it should be, and neither she nor Kaminsky tried in anyway to conjure up the past. Shelton expresses Lili’s fears and fragility in autumnal musical brushstrokes drawn from a voice still resonant and expressive.
Cristina María Castro gives an emotionally charged performance as Sunny, without doubt the richest role in the opera. Her every entrance brought a bolt of energy to the performance. It helped that Castro was always center stage with her clarinet, giving voice to Sunny’s emotional roller coaster ride in her exciting soprano.
As Dante, the warm-voiced baritone Eric McKeever was a soft, gentle presence, whose love for his adoptive mother trumped his own frustrations. Blythe Gaissert’s Dr. Claire Klugman set the ball rolling for the drama, but the character lacked grit. Claire’s motivation was curiosity coupled with mild remorse, but lacking either Sunny’s blazing ambition or Dante’s unfulfilled promise.
One of the most touching moments of the performance, however, came when Shelton and Gaissert sang Lili’s “Chosen Son”, her unfinished work for voice, clarinet. The same combination Schubert employed in “Der Hirt auf dem Felsen.”
Geoffrey McDonald and his orchestra played with expression and managed to maintain balance, which was no easy feat given the placement of the singers.
We live in an era that yearns for closure and Cote’s libretto tied things up efficiently. Lili beamed during a moment of mental clarity and Sunny was reconciled with her parents. Dante was at peace with the course his life had taken, while Claire celebrated that music was indeed a pathway to memory for a person suffering from dementia. It carried all the emotional truth of a Hallmark movie.
Lucidity repeats at the Abrons Arts Center for three performances tonight and Saturday and opens at the Seattle Opera on Nov. 21. osopera.org
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