Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” is about a lot of things, but in the end, it’s about redemption.
After three hours of high jinks, including mistaken identities and an upheaval of the social order, the score comes to a halt. The music that emerges from there is solemn and sublime, as the unfaithful Count begs his wife for forgiveness. With grace she grants it, and the rest of the characters join in for a happy finale.
There also is a redemption of sorts taking place at Baryshnikov Arts Center, where “Figaro/Faggots” premiered on Thursday, offering a delirious and often persuasive mash-up of Mozart’s opera and the writings of Larry Kramer, the ferocious activist who died in 2020. Adapted and directed by Kevin Carillo, it imagines an unlikely combination that makes a maligned novel more palatable, with revelations that favor Mozart and Kramer alike.
Mostly, Carillo presents a version of Kramer’s 1978 satire “Faggots,” a roman à clef that for all the brazen courage implied by its title, is a sometimes self-loathing plea for love and commitment in an age of sex- and drug-fueled gay liberation. It has passion but the literary merit of a hastily written first draft.
But what happens when Kramer’s rhetoric of rage chafes against the insistent beauty of Mozart’s score, which Carillo’s show depicts as “a pretty package of life”? He forces the two works to meet somewhere in the middle: the book taking on the trajectory of the opera, in which comedy gives way to earnest profundity; and the music getting a Fire Island revision, never better than with a disco treatment of the aria “Dove sono.”
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