“A brilliant new opera…Rarely does a new opera emerge so perfectly formed, let alone presented in a production as musically and visually stunning.”
—Classical Voice North America
photo: Maria Baranova
A silent, expectant grove.
A fatal encounter between a man,
a woman, and a thief.
Seven testimonies, each offering
a different perspective on the crime.
Sited within a ghost forest in the Pacific Northwest in 1922, this adaptation of Akutagawa’s classic tale unfolds within a barren, haunted landscape devastated by wildfire. Into a terrain of broken dreams, marred by violence and obfuscated by smoke, comes a young woman who upends conventional notions of gender and narratives of victimhood, claiming agency for herself. Transpiring within a frontier territory riven by class struggle and fear of the other, this searing examination into the impossibility of truth manifests a world whose environment is under siege, in which wildly veering personal truths vie with absolute fact, shattering what we think we know.
Akutagawa’s story is a rich provocation, challenging us to scrutinize the ways in which memory—a construct of sound, image and language—interacts with societal power structures and deeply felt personal truths to manufacture competing notions of fact. Made up of a series of emotionally colored, subjective recountings, the opera is suffused with an intensity of focus—spare, architectonic, haunted and haunting, as moving as it is suspenseful. Director Mary Birnbaum’s staging explores the obscuration of fog and infinitesimal perceptual shifts over time, magnifying the questions posed in Akutagawa’s classic tale.
In order to honor the story’s resonances, to get closer to the truth at its core, we’ve transported the work from Japan to the U.S., siting it within a landscape/culture whose contradictions we ourselves inhabit. In remaining true to our lived experience, our intention is to mine the story’s radical truth ever more deeply. The apocalyptic ghost forests of a post-wildfire-season Pacific Northwest are emblematic of yet another truth: that of climate change, which, no matter how we try to look away, can’t be obscured.
photo: Maria Baranova
Synopsis.
A ghost forest in the mountains of Oregon, 1921—the aftermath of a wildfire. We, the audience, are the silent, unseen interlocutor, gathering testimony from seven witnesses / potential perpetrators of a crime.
A woodcutter states that he found a body in the grove, on the mountain where he goes to cut wood. A priest testifies that he passed a man leading a woman on a horse along the Foundry Post Road. A policeman recounts his arrest of Luther Harlow, a local vigilante, who some say is responsible for the spate of women gone missing from the mountain. A woman describes her daughter, Leona, an aspiring botanist, whose new husband, Ambrose, a schoolteacher, appears to have been murdered. The mother pleads with the interlocutor to find the girl, who is missing.
Luther Harlow confesses. Taken by the beauty of a young woman he encountered along the mountain road, he had tried to lure the girl and her husband into a nearby grove, promising treasure. As Luther tells his story, he relives the events: The girl resists Luther’s ruse, but her husband, eager to regale his new bride with pretty trinkets, follows Luther into the grove. Luther quickly disposes of the young man, and when Leona discovers her husband bound and gagged, she pulls a knife on Luther, who wrestles her to the ground, intending to assault the girl. But she slips from his grasp, pelting Luther with a rock, knocking him out just long enough for her to free her husband, arming him with her knife. Ambrose is hesitant at first, but Leona urges him to fight. Although the schoolteacher is no match for the vigilante, he somehow holds his own. Soon enough, however, Ambrose’s strength wanes. Leona intervenes by shooting Ambrose’s rifle into the air, and in the confusion, Luther stabs him, grabs the gun and flees, leaving him for dead.
Leona reluctantly delivers her testimony of having encountered a dubious man on the mountain road; of her husband Ambrose’s misguided desire to follow the stranger into the grove; of being left to wait alone in the gloam, calling on the relics of the ghost forest for protection. When the man returns without Ambrose, she follows, terrified of what has befallen her husband. In the grove, Luther attempts to assault her, but she eludes him, hurling a stone at him, freeing Ambrose so that he can defend them both. Ambrose hesitates, and she lashes out at him. Ambrose has no choice but to fight a losing battle. Leona again steps in, pointing Ambrose’s rifle to the sky and firing. In the tumult, the marauder disappears, and Leona discovers that her husband is bleeding. She gathers medicinal plants to staunch the wound. But as she tends to Ambrose, he jealously rebukes her, accusing her of having consorted with Luther. Thrown by his anger, she balks, and in that moment he expires. Believing she killed him, she tries, over and over again, to take her own life, but fails. Leona confesses that she murdered her husband.
A medium channels the dead man, who articulates the secret Ambrose was never able to tell his new bride—that his heart has always been weak, ever since suffering from rheumatic fever as a small child. The medium and Ambrose relive the incidents leading up to Ambrose’s death from his perspective, tormented by the fact that in his final moments, he allowed his wife to believe it was she who killed him, rather than his failing heart.