Handel’s Aci, Galatea e Polifemo (1708)
National Sawdust
July 12, 2017
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| Intransigent lovers up against steep odds and a domineering employer Photo credit: Jill Steinberg |
Going into director Christopher Alden’s take on Handel’s Aci,
Galatea e Polifemo at National Sawdust, I knew we were in for some kind of
theatrical treat. He is the kind of director who always rises to the occasion.
He didn’t disappoint. I found myself caught up and transported by his vision.
The story of Aci and Galatea’s frustrated love is close to my
heart. Ovid’s telling of the story toward the end of the Metamorphoses is a full of his characteristic humor and irreverent
genius. Written during a period in which staged narrative works were anathema, Handel’s
early Italian oratorio pushes the genre to the limit. It is packed with highly
dramatic narrative content that by its very nature transcends the park-and-bark
format of a mere courtly recital and Alden’s staging brought it all forcefully
to life.
Veering away from the bucolic setting of the original myth where
nymphs and shepherds frolic along the wooded coasts of Sicily, Handel’s
librettist Nicola Giuvo transposes the story to a more regal milieu. He casts
the innocent young lovers Aci and Galatea as servants who are employed in the
irascible Cyclops Polifemo’s bath complex. Christopher Alden capitalizes on the
class warfare element of this shift in focus.
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| The bathes of Polifemo welcome the audience upon arrival Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco |
As the audience filed into the space we were immediately
transported to the baths of Polifemo. Projections of Sicilian maiolica tiles
adorned two of the walls in the otherwise space-age venue at National Sawdust
in Williamsburg, and a claw foot bathtub stood toward one end of the stage.
Once the orchestra assembled, two figures dressed in unisex hospital-like
scrubs complete with hygienic shower caps plodded mechanically out to the
center of the stage, each with their own personal Swiffer.® They
stood deadpan with their shoulders square to the audience.
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| Suicide is always an option Photo credit: Jill Steinberg |
Cue the electronic
sound effects of vigorous scrubbing and the two begin running their Swiffers
back and forth across the floor in front of them, brainlessly, and otherwise
motionlessly. It is mind-numbing work and they couldn’t have done it more
dejectedly, all while they sing about the beauty of a life lived at liberty,
carefree amidst the flowers and the trees. How’s that for irony?
As in the most vivid madrigal word paintings in music of this
moment in baroque musical history, their voices ran frolicking through fields
of melismas, up and down hills of scales with dramatic intensity, though their
body language communicated nothing more than an uninspired humdrum day of hard labor.
Yet in the mouths of these two talented interpreters of the baroque, not a
single note felt superfluous. It never felt like virtuosity as an end in
itself, which is really saying something for the singers as well as the
direction.
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| The predator and his prey Photo credit: Jill Steinberg |
The gender confusion
created by the gender neutral costumes worn by Aci and Galatea in the opening
the opera is only heightened by the score that casts the young shepherd boy Aci
as a pants role, sung by soprano Ambur
Braid, and his beloved sea nymph Galatea as a castrato, sung on this
occasion by the extraordinary countertenor Anthony
Roth Costanzo. As a result, the production kept you guessing as to which of
the two was going to be the boy and which the girl, especially since they were
even hard to tell apart with their bodies and hair almost completely covered.
Aci launches with a
vengeance into a jealousy aria while “he” cleans the tub of the cruel padrone, as the tile projections begin
to reveal a series of Big Brother-like unflinching eyes at random across the
wall. The effect is both trippy and creepy. He climaxes in an intentionally
screeching high note, drowning out even the orchestra with his frustration. The
production featured several literal representations of the metaphors of the
text, generally in the use of digital projections designed by Mark Grey that unfurled
on the rear walls.
Enter Polifemo.
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| Polifemo is a Cyclops operating on a whole other level Photo credit: Jill Steinberg |
Just before the
predatory padrone makes his entrance
the maiolica tile projection faded away and enormous Trump-style bold block
letters in shimmering gold slowly appear across the full expanse of the wall
from floor to ceiling. I half expected him to come out with a sad orange-tinged
comb over, but thankfully that wasn’t the case. Instead the overbearing
Polifemo was sung by the dashing bass-baritone Davóne Tines, a slender ogre of a man,
who struck an imposing presence. Both vocally and physically he
commanded the scene. In his opening aria he pulled off his long melismatic
lines with a giant sound that was technically stunning inasmuch as it left me
breathless. His baritone sound grew plush and smooth as he lowered down into
the bathtub to terrorize his servants.
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| The Lord who refuses to let sleeping lovers lie Photo credit: Jill Steinberg |
Each da capo repetition
gave him the opportunity to add a subtle variation on his embodiment of the
character, piling up twisted little motivations for each of the modulations
especially during the tender moments of his Non
sempre, no, crudele, / mi parlerai così (No, cruel one, you will not always
speak to me like that). To which Galatea responds, while “she” shaves and
bathes him, Folle, quanto mi rido / di
tua vana speranza (Foolish one, how your vain hope makes me laugh). More
than just class warfare, the opera is about the grotesque abuse of power, or
rather the powerful imposing themselves sexually on the powerless – a timely
topic to say the least.
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| Caps on and gender rules don't apply Photo credit: Jill Steinberg |
Once they finally
take off their shower caps, it becomes clear that Alden is bent on playing with
our expectations even further. He had Ambur Braid play up her femininity by
flaunting her luscious locks of flowing hair despite the fact that in every
other way she wore the “pants” in the relationship, while Anthony Roth Costanzo
seemed to embody an albeit effete masculinity but whose behavior tended toward
the a more feminine set of gender roles. It was a thrilling gender bending
spectacle that only became more intricately entangled as the story evolved.
What made Alden’s vision richer than a mere inditement of Trump’s
America was the fluidity with which he played with gender. Polifemo’s appetites
seem to know no boundaries when it comes to his insatiable and indiscriminate
desire to enact his perverted sense of cruelty on those beneath him. The gender
neutrality implicit in the score, here made explicit by Alden and his case,
only served to heighten our disgust of Polifemo’s abuses.
Alden additionally doubles down on the tragic outcome of the
story. Galatea ends up taking her own life even before her lover has a chance
to take his revenge and fall victim to the Cyclops. As a result, Galatea makes
her final musical gesture (in a break with the libretto and its original
setting) from beyond the grave. Aci goes out with the classic Handel gesture of
pulsing strings. Impara, ingrata (Learn,
ungrateful one), “he” sings to the wrong person at first, ostensibly lecturing
all parties involved about the lengths to which love can take us.
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| The outlook for the poor nymph Galatea is bleak Photo credit: Jill Steinberg |
And so, as in many of the Alden productions I have seen, the show concludes
with a sick and twisted gesture. The light of a chandelier alone illumines the
funerary final scene. Polifemo seems to be haunted by the trail of bodies left
behind that flop about a bit too violently, like fish out of water gasping for
a final breath. He props the dead bodies up against the wall together so that
the final image we get is that of the frustrated young lovers in death holding
hands. Alden’s lovers are memorialized with a tragic flourish of bathos and the
audience leaves feeling particularly bleak about the state of current affairs.
– Lui
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| A curtain call for troubling times Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco |
