Post offices in the United States are typically a scene of long lines and online return drop-offs. But in an opera that opened at BAM Fisher last weekend, it became an arena of political debate between co-workers, with topics like gay marriage, free speech, racism, economic hardship and the ability to trust in government institutions. Also, the ghost of Benjamin Franklin was there, and he would like everyone to stop fighting.
This is Laura Kaminsky’s “The Post Office,” a work produced by American Opera Projects that attempts to capture the nebulous “current moment,” alongside two other productions by small companies doing the same: “Constance: A Confession,” by Experiments in Opera, and a stark staging of Samuel Barber’s “Vanessa” at Heartbeat Opera.
“The Post Office,” with its checklist of hot-button topics, encapsulates all that can go awry when an opera attempts to tackle the present. Kaminsky’s score has Ives-inflected harmonies that neither offend nor excite, but Elaine Sexton’s limp, pedantic libretto is the culprit. A workplace friendship between Frank (Brian Jeffers), a white gay man, and Ben (Markel Reed), a religious Black man, is tested when Frank announces his engagement, not knowing that Ben strongly opposes gay marriage. Two others join the debate with cookie-cutter opinions: A white lesbian customer (Blythe Gaissert) who believes in the power of history and free speech is set at odds with another postal employee, a white Trump voter (Sarah Moulton Faux) whose primary concern is getting food on her table.
Flattening the texture of political conflict, “The Post Office” addresses no one. A central quartet sees all the characters singing “I am misunderstood,” but since the characters never take on any nuance or specificity beyond the demographics they purport to represent, they can do nothing but misunderstand one another’s flimsy positions. Only a deus ex Franklin can clean up the mess, chastising them all with the message: “America is great but flawed. America must evolve.” Even with Charles Renfro’s ingenious set, constructed from postal boxes that pull out to reveal furniture and hidden props, and some very fine singing from Reed and David Adam Moore as Franklin cannot redeem this threadbare parable.
Opera can be contemporary and relevant. New works have told the stories of living figures, adapted 21st-century novels and plays, and tackled recent history. They have commented on climate change, racism, school shootings, queer rights and more. But relevance is also elusive, and aspiring to it risks creating an opera like “The Post Office,” which is topical but not artful.
“Constance: A Confession,” at HERE Arts Center, is a spoof of online grifter culture, created by a team of composers and librettists that make up Experiments in Opera’s Writers Room. It is directed at everyone whose algorithms have been hijacked by New Age nonsense and influencers who suggests that your gut health relies on embracing the “divine feminine.” The story follows its title character (Sydney Anderson) as she fails upward from manipulative M.F.A. student to bumbling tarot reader to wellness cult leader hawking colorful smoothies (with a side of psychological abuse and murder) to her followers, whom she calls Rainbow Warriors.
The music and dialogue of “Constance” may not be blazingly original, but it is anchored by wry humor, strong performances and clear intelligence. And it calls out the archetypes required for any confidence scheme: the mark (various characters named Mark, all played with a fun touch by the warm-voiced baritone Nathaniel Sullivan); an enabler (Sishel Claverie, excellent); and a skeptic (Zen Wu). Anderson is a genuine find as Constance, with expressive features alongside control and vulnerability in her rich lyric soprano.
If the libretto does not always adequately demonstrate Constance’s charisma, Anderson always does. The Rainbow-Brite colors of Krista Intranuovo Pineman’s costumes and a hilarious Instagram Live segment make the opera’s revelations of physical and sexual violence feel all the more surprising; it’s all silly fun until it isn’t. “Constance” refracts and reflects modern life, delivering its argument about manipulators and tragic gullibility without selling out its characters or assaulting its audience with the moral.
Heartbeat Opera doesn’t need a contemporary setting or a world premiere to make the case for a work’s modern appeal, especially that of “Vanessa,” from 1958. It’s a shame this title doesn’t come around more often, replete as it is with incestuous erotic substitutions, vicious female rivalries, creeping dread and enough brittle self-delusions to stock a Todd Haynes film. It also contains some of Barber’s finest vocal music, and a mythic-feeling premise in the libretto by Gian Carlo Menotti. The title character lives in frozen isolation with her mother and niece, Erika, in their remote manor. Having obsessively preserved her appearance for two decades, Vanessa awaits the return her of former lover, Anatol. Someone comes back, only, it isn’t him. It’s his son, who arrives to seduces both aunt and niece to different but equally ruinous ends.
Initially horrified by the impostor Anatol, Vanessa then proves susceptible to his mercenary tactics and increasingly confuses him with his father. Erika is seduced by him too, but, all too aware of his superficiality, and paralyzed by terror and desire, miscarries his child before taking up Vanessa’s role, claiming, “Now it is my turn to wait.” It’s marvelously creepy and mysterious.
At Baruch Performing Arts Center, R.B. Schlather’s minimalist production, which first ran at the Williamstown Theater Festival last summer, reimagines the opera’s gothic setting as a Hitchcockian play of light and shadows, with Yuki Nakase Link’s lighting distorting characters’ forms into shadow monsters or revealing them in unflattering harshness. As Vanessa and Anatol, Inna Dukach and Freddie Ballentine brought power but also a tendency to over-sing. Kelsey Lauritano’s Erika was the most gripping; she has a mournful subtlety to her face and voice, at once dramatically clear and still understated.
Cut through the gothic trappings of “Vanessa,” and you’ll find a cynical core: If true love is impossible or far-off, do you entomb yourself in a lonely life of waiting or embrace whatever delusions are required to accept an impostor? Vanessa chooses the delusion, and Erika chooses the tomb, left in Schlather’s staging trapped in box of light that is both clarifying and blinding. Landing with horrifying force through an era of widespread romantic reckonings and exhortations not to “settle,” this production suggests that “Vanessa” was never anything but current.
Unlike “The Post Office,” “Constance” and “Vanessa” offer a kind of relevance beyond topicality. “Constance” depicts a familiar and modern subject, but with offbeat humor and a distinct story. “Vanessa,” on the other hand, insists that good operas — and good productions — will always invite readings between the past and present.
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