by Steven Pisano
(Photo by Ellen Appel.)
War is everywhere. People are starving. The meager food rations air-dropped from military helicopters are not nearly enough to stave off hunger. All the animals, including the birds, have died. Or maybe they have all moved away, as if sensing that something even more terrifying than war is coming closer. Clearly, the apocalypse is at hand.
This might sound like a slight exaggeration of today’s front page reporting on Syria or Afghanistan or Iraq. But it is the very real, and bleak, world faced by the family in David T. Little and Royce Vavrek’s Dog Days, an electrifying and, to say the least, startling chamber opera which had its New York premiere at the NYU Skirball Center this past weekend, presented by Beth Morrison Projects as part of this year’s Prototype Festival. (It was originally produced in 2012 at Montclair State University.)
Dog Days is extreme. It is like being Tasered with a 1000 volts of electrical energy, straight to the brain. It won’t kill you. It will jolt you alive. But it does take a little while to get there. The first act at least partially tricks us into thinking this might be some peculiar variation on Beauty and the Beast. In the advertising for the production, it certainly looks like a quirky rom-com between a Man-Dog and a wide-eyed young girl. But if you took this bait, you are in for a shock.
The stage opens on what appears to be a wholesome family from the 1950s. The kids bait each other at the dinner table. The parents recite platitudes. But look at the details—the mountain of garbage bags behind their house, the broken furniture, the projection of a sickly yellow sky on a huge screen hung over the stage. Something is not quite right here. We aren’t in some healthy cornpone town in Kansas, but isolated somewhere in a poisoned and inhospitable American wasteland.
The two brothers, Elliott and Pat, strut around the house shirtless, watch TV without a picture, laze about on a fractured couch smoking dope, and tease their younger sister Lisa who is burgeoning on the cusp of adolescence. The short story by Judy Budnitz, upon which this opera-theater is based, is told through Lisa’s eyes.
The family joins hands to say grace at each paltry meal, but what do they have to be thankful for, except that they are still alive? This family is holding on to its humanity by just a thread. Their hollow rituals are what is saving them from, well, being just like dogs. And when an actual dog comes snuffling along behind their house, looking for scraps of food, Howard, the father of this clan, grabs his shot gun and vows to shoot the vagrant animal. But Lisa intervenes. After all, Dad, this dog is not really a dog, but is a man, a human being driven to act like a dog by the horrors of the world around him.
David T. Little’s music in the opening act is a bit scattered. There is very little substantial to hang one’s ear on. The score is a mix of musical elements from classical opera, Broadway-style musical theater, and rock and roll. Indeed, if Dog Days ended after the first act, it would be something of a disappointment. The music is a bit too incidental, and while it is evocative, we’re not sure yet of what.
But hold on to your ticket, because Act Two is about to deliver one of the most thrilling new opera scores you’re likely to hear for quite some time. I am at a loss to make comparisons, because it is unlike anything I have heard or seen before in a theater (though some science fiction and war movies have achieved this kind of intensity, minus the music).
This is where Dog Days starts to get very interesting. In the second act, that frail thread the family has been clinging to, determined at all costs to maintain their humanity in the face of worldwide insanity, is cut. Of course, history is replete with examples of how men and women, both as individuals and as cultures, have become unhinged from the acceptable expectations of civilization due to unusual and aggravated circumstances. And in a nuclear winter, if indeed that is what Dog Days represents, the stakes are higher than they’ve ever been before.
Matching the challenge of those higher stakes, David T. Little has written some extraordinary, almost revolutionary music. In the second act aria “Hello there, beautiful,” Lisa sings to a mirror, as she strips to her underwear and regards her hunger-emaciated young body, imagining herself to be a beautiful fashion model. It is one of the most audacious songs I have ever heard in a theater. This one set piece, with glorious singing by Lauren Worsham, video design by Jim Findlay, and ingenious use of a video camera in the middle of the mirror, which displays the oversized image of Lisa over the stage, was worth the price of admission alone.
(Photo by James Matthew Daniel.)
The opera from this point forward to the thrilling and inevitable conclusion becomes a vortex of increasingly rousing and disorienting music. The closest analogy I can make is this: Imagine yourself sucked up inside the funnel of a tornado with its howling winds at ear-splitting decibels and its swirling whirlpool of dangerously sharp debris. It draws you up through the spiraling storm until finally it spits you out at the top–bloodied, barbaric, and barely recognizable as human.
Beyond the obvious credit that must be given to Little’s imaginative and breathtaking music, the success of the production also hinges on Royce Vavrak’s tight libretto. He sticks close to the actual short story, using much of the original dialogue and duplicating its straightforward narrative. But he also adds immeasurably in new lyrics written particularly for the second act, where he displays a formidable talent for believable but illustrative dialogue.
And while Worsham is the clear vocal star of the production (after all, it is Lisa’s story), the other cast members all perform well. James Bobick is Howard, the father, who sometimes beats his chest and bellows how he thinks his family should live right, but other times slumps defeatedly in a chair. Marnie Breckenridge sings the existentially paralyzed, and unnamed, Mother. The two brothers, Pat and Elliott, are sung by Peter Tantsits and Michael Marcotte, respectively. Cherry Duke plays an Army Captain who visits the family, asking the Father to enlist his sons in the war, but the Father says no. The performance artist John Kelly plays the part of the dog, whom Lisa later chooses to call Prince; he does not sing, though he whimpers a few times, and his physicality–sniffing, pawing, and eating scraps of food off the ground—was very canine. The music was played by a talented group named Newspeak, under the musical direction of Alan Pierson.