Opera Ready to Fly : Ventura composer Jeff Kaiser’s ‘The Rooster Brings Heresy’ will make its debut Friday at the Plaza Players Theater.

Ventura composer Jeff Kaiser is an excitable man, prone to hopping from topic to topic in a conversation. In a recent lunch interview, he was also prone to bursting into song, right there in the public forum of Frankie’s restaurant in old town Ventura.

Of course, Kaiser’s head is especially fit to burst as he prepares his first opera, “The Rooster Brings Heresy.” Kaiser’s manic quality and nervous creative impulses factor heavily in his ability to survive in the perilous, precarious life of the independent composer.

He gets things done by sheer will, blind ambition and resourcefulness. He flies in the face of indifference and skepticism, and makes some engaging music in the process.

Kaiser graduated from Westmont College in 1985, and earned a master’s degree in choral conducting from Azusa in 1987. Since then he has been assiduously applying his compositional trade outside of academia. At the same time, Kaiser has been learning the fine logistic art of grantsmanship and carving out opportunities as he goes.

He also blows a mean horn. On trumpet--and other obscure off-shoots of the brass family--Kaiser specializes in atonal smears, coy quotations and a generally madcap approach.

Last Saturday afternoon at the Contemporary Arts Forum in Santa Barbara, Kaiser provided his cathartic and comical style in a group led by bassist Jim Connolly. Connolly is a frequent Kaiser collaborator and a member of the guerrilla jazz group they call Maha Cuisinart.

In the fall of 1991, Kaiser unveiled his ambitious Requiem, which cut a swath between modernity and traditional forms and was performed in the Ventura Oddfellows Lodge. It was while working on that project that Kaiser had a raw flash of inspiration: He thought it would be fun to write an opera.

Looking for an original text, Kaiser put the call out to a few area poets and found an enthusiastic librettist in local poet Matt Swain.

“He’s very abstract,” Kaiser said. “The first poem I heard him read was ‘There Are No Suburban Cows.’ ” He gave me a basic seven-page poem. I adapted it, broke it up into characters. I didn’t change any words though.

“He uses a lot of Dada and found-poetry techniques. This has excerpts from cookbooks, from the history of Bauhaus, from Wilhelm Reich’s biography.”

More than a year later, Kaiser’s first opera is ready to fly. Needless to say, when “The Rooster Brings Heresy” has its opening Friday night at the Plaza Players Theater in Ventura’s Livery Arts Center, it won’t be a conventional affair.

But the goal is not esoterica for its own sake, but rather to create an entertaining and inventive operatic concoction.

“I’m a very serious person,” Kaiser said, “but I’m also a joker. There’s a lot of humor in my work, even the opera.”

Kaiser admitted his fear “that the word opera will make people think of orange breastplates, some guy in Italian clothes dancing around the stage. It’s a modern opera. People say ‘Oh, you mean a musical?’ No, it’s not a musical. It’s an opera.”

Keeping an eye on the bottom line while pushing the creative envelope was Kaiser’s challenge. “The opera was supposed to be with reduced forces, affordable and redoable.”

As abstract and/or absurd as the text and narrative seem to be for “The Rooster Brings Heresy,” the musical aspect, said Kaiser, is “not that dissonant. The text is so abstract, that I tried to counterbalance that with melodic usage.”

For his latest venture, Kaiser has assembled a gifted cast and crew, willing to brave the scenario of low pay and hard work to make a grass-roots production fly. Oxnard-based singer Geraldine Decker has worked with numerous opera companies, including the New York Met. Doc Reynolds, a veteran of theater for more than 50 years, was a teacher to Decker and specializes in international dialects.

Also in the singing cast are Katherine O’Hara, Charles Padilla--whose day job is in the administration of St. John’s Regional Medical Center--Deby Tygell and Linda Sorisio.

Roger Meyer, the lighting director, worked with the Xanadu experimental theater in Santa Monica, an avant-garde theater company in the ‘70s. Paul Benavidez, a local sculptor, is doing sets, and Melissa Fair is doing the costumes.

Operas are inherently collaborative endeavors, and collaborations, Kaiser said, are “difficult, because your vision can get watered down. I never want that to happen. I want to have control.”

For this piece, the only live human musical performance will be from the singing cast. Kaiser’s instrumental forces will be composed of a taped tapestry of computer-generated, synthesized and digitally sampled sounds.

“The score is notated such that it could be performed by live instrumentalists,” Kaiser explained. “I don’t like to have people work for free, and the amount of rehearsal time is so absurd, the sequencer seemed to be the best option.”

On the way out of the restaurant, Kaiser passed local pastor Dan Stevens, a former employer of Kaiser’s. They exchanged greetings, and Stevens’ parting words, with a grin, were “don’t let the heresy go too far.”

Kaiser does have a way of going too far, and taking audiences along with him. A new music bon vivant in a town you might not expect to be a hotbed of new ideas, Kaiser has actually made adventurous music a viable commodity here.

“My general idea with music is to do one large-scale composition a year, and then do as many smaller projects. I’m half a year off.

“My goal is to write, write, write until I’m 40,” said the 31-year-old Kaiser, “and then I’ll find a job.”

* WHERE AND WHEN

“The Rooster Brings Heresy,” Friday and Saturday, March 4 to 6, and March 11 to 13 at 8 p.m., Plaza Players Theater, 34 N. Palm St., Ventura. For information, call 652-2820.