When murder, revenge, insanity and, yes, even incest can make for a riveting evening of entertainment, you know something either peculiar or spectacular is going on.
In this case, it's Seattle Opera's stunning première of the latest version of "Mourning Becomes Electra." The opera is based on seminal American playwright Eugene O'Neill's interpretation of a Greek tragedy by Aeschylus, which boasts an impressive lineup of transgressions with disastrous results.
The complex saga of the dysfunctional Mannon family begins with Gen. Ezra Mannon arriving home from the Civil War. Ezra's wife, Christine, has taken refuge from the coldness of her husband in a love affair with sea captain Adam Brant. Adam happens to be Ezra's illegitimate nephew, out to bring down the family for disowning him. Daughter Lavinia loves her father and Adam, and bitterly hates her mother.
When Christine tries to escape her frigid marriage by killing her husband, the house of Mannon, domino-like, begins to fall. The Mannons' son, Orin, who has an unnatural affection for his mother, comes home from the war, and he and Lavinia murder Adam in revenge for Ezra's death. Events turn even bloodier from there.
That Marvin David Levy's opera made it to McCaw Hall is a surprising tale of resurrection. Speight Jenkins, Seattle Opera's general director, wasn't enamored of "Mourning Becomes Electra" when he attended its première at New York's Metropolitan Opera in 1967. Composer Marvin David Levy's score was atonal, in keeping with the musical vogue of the time, which Jenkins didn't find appealing.
When the opera was resurrected, with modifications, in 1998 at Chicago's Lyric Opera, Jenkins' response was dramatically different. This time, the composer had given his lyrical nature greater rein, paring down the score's dissonances - and Jenkins loved it.
Yet Levy wisely did not tinker all of the sharp edges out of his score, with a dramatic impact that is evident even before the curtain rises. In the prelude, the bloody conflict between family members is foretold in jangling dissonances that crash abruptly into silence, and the Mannon ghosts are presaged in eerie passages. Throughout the opera, Lavinia and especially Christine sing passages of fury and agony that soar into musical screams. Orin's growing insanity after his mother's death, for which he blames himself, becomes apparent in his increasingly skewed notes.
Levy's score adds much-needed depth to the libretto, which tends toward the melodramatic after trimming O'Neill's verbose trilogy from six and a half hours to just over half that length, including intermissions. More cutting might benefit the opera's last act, which drags a bit, perhaps because it doesn't show the same musical inventiveness as the previous acts.
One of the things I love about opera is that strong female characters abound. "Mourning Becomes Electra" offers a bonus: two powerful women, Christine and Lavinia, duking it out for supremacy. Jenkins' pitch-perfect casting netted the charismatic Lauren Flanigan for the role of Christine. Flanigan is a powerhouse soprano for whom the highest notes - of which there are plenty in this opera - seem as natural as breathing. As with all of the performers, Flanigan is also a convincing actress. Her every move, no matter how appalling, mesmerizes.
Nina Warren's Lavinia meets Flanigan's Christine on every level. Lavinia may hate her mother and love her father, but everything isn't black and white with her. Lavinia's desire for the love she felt she never got from her mother still spikes through her hatred. As the opera ends, Warren's Lavinia acquires a courageously tragic stature as she accepts her inevitable fate.
Gabor Andrasy's Ezra begs compassion as he confesses to Christine that he now recognizes his prior behavior toward her was wrong and he wants to build a truly loving relationship.
All of the actors show a sympathetic side, so we pity the characters as they spiral toward their doom, even Jason Howard's Adam as he becomes ensnared in his own machinations and falls in love with Christine.
Kurt Ollmann is perfectly awkward as Orin, the easily manipulated son who hasn't figured out who he is. Both he and Howard beautifully handle some difficult musical passages.
Julianne Gearhart, making her Seattle Opera debut as Helen Niles, a neighbor who has her sights set on Orin, is the essence of innocence in both her characterization and her porcelain soprano. Morgan Smith is fine as Peter Niles, who is seeking the hand of Lavinia, and he is particularly moving in a shocking scene with Lavinia in Act III. Archie Drake is effective as Jed, the head servant.
Jenkins asked Bartlett Sher, artistic director of Intiman Theatre, to direct the production because of Sher's classical theater background. "Mourning Becomes Electra" is a theatrical opera that works only if the characters' emotions resonate as real. Sher effectively infuses that kind of visceral immediacy, a hallmark of his work at Intiman, into this production.
Conductor Richard Buckley, who conducted the Chicago production, has a fine-tuned handle on both modern music and the orchestra's role in this opera. With impeccable timing, Buckley keeps his orchestra a servant to the actors onstage. The score frequently enhances the action even as it disappears from the audience's awareness, much as it does in a movie.
Michael Yeargan designed the Mannons' ancestral home in a chilling off-white with oversized columns, windows and walls that dwarf the characters - an apt metaphor for the looming family history that overshadows the living Mannons' hopes and dreams.
Like Yeargan, Jennifer Tipton, recognized as a top lighting designer, eschews color. Without being overbearing, Tipton relies on white, suggesting the glaring light of an interrogation that pins the characters to the truth of their misdeeds.
The vibrant colors in which costume designer Elizabeth Caitlin Ward swathes the female characters are true to the time period - and telling. The vaguely unsettling green of Christine's dress in the opening scene epitomizes her attempt to burst from the cold confines of the Mannon house into the warmth of her newfound love.
But, in the end, none of the Mannons can escape their family's curse.[[In-content Ad]]
