Insanity, Poetry and Opera

Beyond the more cosmetic complaints I have about Visitations, the two new one-act operas by Jonathan Berger that premiered in Bing on Friday, there is a deeper issue present in the first of the pair. Berger and librettist Dan O'Brien do an unfortunately poor job of representing psychosis, namely paranoid schizophrenia, in Theotokia.

The basic premise of Theotokia is that Leon, an overweight and bedraggled schizophrenic, is haunted by voices from both the spiritual leader of the Shakers and the Yeti Mother, a Mary figure. There is also the requisite figure of the terrible mother who only sees how her child's mental illness affects her, reminiscent of every other artwork featuring a mentally ill person, because the idea of bad parenting is easier to grasp than the horrible implication that similar conditions could befall anybody.

Many problems are evident already: Hearing voices is not necessarily a sign of mental illness and should not be stigmatized. And there's the whole 'equating orthodox religious belief with mental illness' issue. And for the grand catharsis (which I only gathered from the gloss in the program; the lyrics were basically indecipherable), Leon realizes he's been hallucinating and is in fact just crazy, the great improbability of which beggars character development that has been lost in all of the confusing dream-sequence trickery.

These could, possibly, be excused. It's only one-act, it can't be scapegoated for the way that mental illness is portrayed across virtually all media, etc. But it's the aesthetic choices for how schizophrenia is depicted that are truly offending. Berger plays into the idea that all music for stories dealing with crazy people should be harsh, dissonant, atonal and arrhythmic, the effect of which seems to be mostly to drive the audience as crazy as the characters. Think Black Swan or Donnie Darko or any play written by a high-schooler that strives to be deep. The music was dark and percussive and left no time for any sort of levity. Most of the melody consisted of random ascending runs of whole tone scales or arpeggiations of augmented chords from various members of the orchestra. The only moments of harmony came in scenes featuring the Shaker congregation, which were rather nicely warped melodies reminiscent of hymns. Tempo was similarly lacking. If there was a beat at all it was fast and frenetic, a cheap way of building tension with no substantive shift in the style of the music.

Poetry Magazine opened their February issue with a poem entitled “The Orange Bottle” by Joshua Mehigan (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/245222 ) that, until the last line, does a remarkable job of depicting the trials of psychosis. Identifying where Theotokia falls short is easier when compared to this poem.

Serious mental illness isn't like listening to a John Cage piece all the time. It's like being subject to a structure that no one else around you recognizes. “The Orange Bottle” is primarily a lilting, almost whimsical series of ABAB rhyming quatrains that teeter on the brink of strict meter. In strong moments, or moments where the reader should assume the central character's view, the meter slips away and the poem's form starts skipping like a record, lingering just long enough on a line for it to become uncomfortable. Creating this effect with music is difficult, far more difficult than settling for unnecessary dissonance, but it's powerful. Examples that come to mind include the second movement of Symphonie Pathetique, Tchaikovsky's otherworldy paean to grief, which features an undanceable waltz in 5/4 time, or Alban Berg's Lyric Suite, which succeeds despite and because of its shirking of traditional tonality, or any of Shostakovich's string quartets. Berger even made allusions to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring in the piece, which is the greatest argument for the benefits of atonality done well.

I'm no expert in music theory, especially classical, by any stretch of the imagination. Just because I couldn't discern any deeper significance to Berger's musical choices doesn't mean none exists. But I have at least a cursory knowledge of theory, and probably more than most of the audience at the concert. If it wasn't noticeable at all to me, then the likelihood that a majority of the audience left feeling the opera did more than just string together random groups of notes is fairly low. An accurate, or at least compelling, portrayal of mental illness demands some finesse. Dissonance with no structure is an insultingly elementary way of demonstrating the protagonist's mental instability. This is only worsened by the fact that there's no progression whatsoever in the play. Leon starts crazy and ends crazy, with a brief confusing moment of recognition. The music has no chance to build or develop because the opera itself doesn't.

This isn't to say the music was beyond redemption. The parts written for percussion were wonderful. Scene III featured Leon beating a rhythm out on his body, which was done on drums and was precisely what I wished the rest of the opera was like. It was motivic but was based on simple rhythms that aren't common in any Western music genre. It felt like a pattern that could make sense, but lied just past the scope of accepted musical figures. And the singers, especially Leon, were all remarkable talents. The acting and singing were compelling in their own right.

The set design came so close to accuracy and escaping cliché that its failures were all the more upsetting. A large swath of white cloth hung down from the battens over the seating directly behind the stage, which served as a projection screen for shots of candles and the Himalayas. The candle imagery was rather trite, like the gimmick as a whole. But there was one redeeming moment: During a breakdown scene, a clip was aired that appeared to be a video of a cell dividing over and over again played backward, the effect being that a swarm of moving polygons slowly collected and merged until one fuzzy circle remained. The trypophobic discomfort of watching this unfold was far more effective than any sudden appogiaturas that Berger employed in conveying the horror of being in a world your brain isn't suited for. This was seen also in the lighting design. Most of the stage was lit by three ellipsoidals with grid patterns that were at acute angles to each other. These again caused an uneasy clash throughout the show; the patterns seemed to be a part more of Leon's world than the audience's. These successes were off-put by Leon's direct surroundings, which consisted of a series of charcoal drawings of circles. The doodles seemed too simplistic. Far more could be made of what brought Leon to draw. I think the most fascinating part of stories about mentally ill characters is seeing their creative output. But Leon was constantly denied a voice throughout the show. I felt like Berger and O'Brien tried too hard to make his hallucinations speak for him, but his final realization showed that more existed to the character than these visions, which could only be seen in his percussion solo and these repetitive drawings.

Theotokia is ambitious. It basically seeks to narrate the thoughts of a deranged man in such a way as to make him both a figure of pity and of commiseration. Unfortunately, Berger's reliance on abstract and uncompelling musical motives leaves his main character just an uncomfortable man in a straitjacket. The composer would do well to look at how the mentally ill have been depicted in works like “The Orange Bottle” as opposed to the Black Swan method of aggressive and unenlightening discord.