Opera Philadelphia and Fisher Center LAB present Suddenly Last Summer, adapted from Tennessee Williams

Suddenly Last Summer, which had a short run at the Forrest last week (October 23-25), was co-commissioned and co-produced by Fisher Center LAB and Opera Philadelphia, and premiered last June at the Fisher Center at Hudson Valley’s Bard College. Bryan, Lester, and Fish have created a new breed of opera for our rapidly changing world.

Southern Gothic meets opera

Readers who have not read or watched Williams’s plays and their screen adaptations may puzzle at my incredulity. But Williams—one of the greatest 20th-century playwrights in the English language—helped create the Southern Gothic genre. His plays are bursting with vile characters who swarm over the weak and defenseless. Relationships unwind like rattlesnakes and images lurid and disgusting lash out at us with ravenous ferocity. Virtue may triumph, but it will never be the same.

Compared to this, opera is pretty tame stuff. But what happens when you blend Williams’s deep psychological probing with new music, and—as this production dares—with the art of painting? A new branch has sprung from the doughty old trunk of opera. The bark of Peri and Caccini (the putative inventors of opera), Verdi and Donizetti, Berg and Barber, gives way just a little to make room for an original mixing of voice, instruments, painting, and storytelling.

From New Orleans to the Mediterranean

Set in New Orleans in the 1930s, the story begins with an introduction to Sebastian's imperious mother, Violet Venable, a rich and ruthless society matron who will do anything to silence her niece, Catherine Holly, including having her lobotomized. Williams uses the language of sin and redemption to reenforce the drama. “Venable” suggests venal sin, but at the same time alludes to her venerable status. “Holly” is one letter short of “holy”, and even the name of the story’s fictional island (Cabezo de Lobo) suggests the dreaded brain surgery.

Catherine suffered trauma after witnessing her cousin Sebastian’s horrific death during a vacation outing at a seamy Mediterranean resort. Telling her story to a doctor, Catherine reveals a tale of greed and indulgence, culminating in a revelation that still shocks readers and viewers more than 50 years after Williams completed the play.

Veracity and lyricism

One of the most effective devices in this opera is the use of spoken text as well as operatic singing. The role of matriarch Violet Venable was spoken by Stephanie Roth Haberle, sometimes with a minimal musical background. Haberle gave a riveting performance, the golden tones of her well-trained voice as delicious as a box of chocolates laced with poison. You should hear her indulging in a soliloquy in which hungry birds devour hatching sea turtles, an image that will be made clear at the opera’s conclusion.

Catherine (Mikaela Bennett), on the other hand, sang her lines, and beautiful, heartbreaking arias they are, as created by Bryan. Bennett has an extraordinary voice with a great range which she wields with impressive interpretive skill. Bryan’s musical choices throughout the opera reflect a deep understanding of the characters, her own experiences growing up in New Orleans, and the dynamics that continue to build, leading to horror, redemption, and the power of silence. This is music of great variety and beauty, but also of long-repressed pain. These features also emerge in the work of the librettists, Lester and Fish, who contributed their significant knowledge of theater and opera to this production, and who honor the veracity and strange lyricism of Williams.

Visual savor and brevity

Visual elements also featured prominently in this production, notably painter Lucy Tarquinio’s expressionist patterns that unfolded across a large screen. We could watch the artist paint from a small studio at stage left (sometimes her tattooed arm intruded on the screen). These spontaneous projections dovetailed to the story in a unique way, adding visual savor and unexpected delight.

On the downside, Suddenly Last Summer is short, perhaps too short for drama on this scale. Certainly, there have been many one-hour operas in the past, and I suspect we’ll see more and shorter operas in the future as audiences redefine what it means to hear and enjoy work in this form. But much of what this production does is original, illuminating, and well worth the suspense. Details about the work’s final revelation are not given here in the hope that audiences unfamiliar with the play may seek out and experience its full impact.

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