Site Specific Theater Thrives
But is it reaching its full potential?
When the pandemic hit, half my family was hiking the start of the Appalachian Trail. They called two days in, with the celebratory news that they had crested the first mountain.
“That’s nice,” I said. “Here, Broadway just went dark.”
That was March 12, 2020, and I have still not returned to a Broadway house, but I have seen plenty of theater.
In December 2021, I went to see “Voyeur” which turned the winter-dark streets of the West Village into 1800s Paris, filling the windows with prostitutes to tell the history of the artist Toulouse-Lautrec. (Best strip tease I have seen in years; sultry music piped in from hurdy-gurdy while the intimate audience stands outside in the cold, hugging ourselves to stay warm, watching the scantily clad actress through a window illuminated by a red and orange glow, tease us with her medical mask: there was a collective gasp when she finally taking it all the way off to reveal the hottest, reddest, wettest lips you’ve ever seen.)
In May, I ran across an outdoor production of Godspell by the New York film Academy that was being played at Elevated Acre. It made me cry to hear people singing in public. Particularly the lyrics about the Beautiful City. (feel free to listen to this great rendition of the song if you also need a good cry.)
Merry Wives by the Public in July in the park almost felt normal, except for the section of possibly unvaccinated patrons sitting six feet apart in pods and not allowed to de-mask, while just across the aisle the vaccinated were smashed cheek-to-jowl eating pizza they had brought for their entire row.
But more recently, it has been opera. The first production I saw was staged on the loading dock just outside of Chelsea Market. Cleverly branded in purple and claiming every participant would get free coffee and chocolate, the world premiere of Robert Paterson’s Cocoa Cantata was billed as a cafe-and-coloratura combo, and we rushed out to the street to hear it. Tricky opera singers, they performed Bach’s Coffee Cantata first, before the premiere, turning an anticipated half hour cup of coffee with a few high notes into a two act, ninety minute production, fulfilling the promise of refreshments with the promised take-home gift bag: containing a single square of luxury chocolate and a tiny sample of whole coffee beans. (the singing was great, mind you.)
But today I saw a production that topped them all for anticipatory intrigue. Site-specific opera by a company called On-Site Opera, claiming to commission works for particular locations. What’s better than theater al-fresco? Definitely theater that is designed to be seen where it is performed.
What Lies Beneath was performed in partnership with the South Street Seaport Museum aboard the tall ship Wavertree:
The show begins with a spectacular bit of African drumming on Djembe by Rasaan Talu Green, which is followed by an excellent rendition by Bernard Holcomb of the “Trickster’s Aria” from the opera Amistad. Truly, the voices were all incredible. It took only moments to realize we were to be treated to a nearly all-Black cast performing opera — and it was thought-provoking to note that this had caused not one ripple in the press, whereas four miles away in Central Park, the same press couldn’t stop talking about how it felt to watch Shakespeare staged by a similarly talented all-Black cast.
Artist are artists. The material in this case was contemporary and moving. The repertoire was lovingly and carefully curated around the themes of sea, ships, and slavery — with cautious trigger-warnings and explanations before any singing began. And indeed, it was effective to listen to these several pieces in such a seaworthy location, with the sunset over Brooklyn providing quite the lighting design. The performances were all exquisite and even the conductor of the tiny orchestra was eye-catching in his muted professionalism. Down to the last note, the audience was captivated by small details: jagged hand-held mirror pieces reflecting the shattered lives of the slaves as well as the sparkle of the ocean when hit by the sun, and yes, hello, literally reflecting the entirely White audience watching the entirely Black ensemble sing about slavery’s lingering damage.
The monodrama Ahab, eloquently performed by bass-baritone Zachary James, was a staged premiere, and James really used the space; opening doors and climbing up and down stairs, throwing himself on storage bins and howling at demons before sinking to his death. Watching him sing, not only did you feel that the slight rocking of the huge ship was intentional, you kind of wished the director (or the museum?) had allowed audiences belowdecks — this performance was the only one that did not treat the ship as a set piece, but as a living environment where an inevitable action was happening in real time.
The most effective moments were when the entire ensemble stood midship to perform 1619: A Song Cycle (Damien Geter, East Coast Premiere). Kudos to costume designer Azalea Fairley for the detail of the ratty, blood-red scarves against the pristine white costumes simultaneously suggesting innocence, Africa, angels, and blood, white sand and bone — it was just wonderful how that one detail started as magic in the hands of the Trickster God and came to fruition as a tenor sang about how much his grandfather hated the color red ever since he was lured into a slave ship by the sight of a pretty red scarf.
While the marketing suggested a narrative opera, this was instead a careful selection of repertoire that held an arc of trickery and innocence, loss of home and loss of self, and a strange, compelling inevitability of the whole — as though the message of the performance was not to blame but to accept: however awful the truth, it was still truth.
The other solos, particularly the Britten, were all well done, and it was such a quiet pleasure to be moved from one part of the ship to another with the tweeting of a boatswain’s whistle. Splitting the ensemble song cycle into two parts was a brilliant stroke.
My wish is that this opera company would commission more pieces for on-site performance, and that ever more interesting architectural spaces would open their doors to this sort of performance. As of yet, this production still makes the audience (and the singers) ignore the fact that from the fore of the ship, we can all still hear the singing in the aft of the ship— and instead of using these acoustics, we and the performers were all forced to ignore them. Imagine how incredible it could have been to hear the painfully moving center-stage chorus we had heard before, but this time in the background — while we watched a duet of wealthy merchants talking about the ship needing to make time to get to the colonies. If someone would write an opera for this company that truly used the surprising background sounds and opportunities inherent in performing in changeable circumstances to enhance the narrative of the piece…let’s just say I’m excited to see what this company does next, and where.
After the show the audience was muted, thoughtful. We had enjoyed the performance but unlike any opera piece I have seen in a theater, we had all also truly experienced the production’s message in a very personal way. This is something that opera in theaters rarely achieves. What Lies Beneath is a grand success and I look forward to traveling to a new site with this excellent operatic team.
