When Telling a Story Just Isn’t Enough

We Americans pride ourselves on being a direct, sensible people. We celebrate straight shooters, straight talkers, straight whiskey and straight stories. We like explanations, not ambiguity. We expect our day in court, clear and rational arguments, unbiased judgments, no loose ends.

We are not, as is Italy, an operatic nation. Just compare the original American western with its spaghetti imitation. Hollywood has given us rational plots, swift action and the likes of John Wayne and James Stewart, who say what they think. But the Italian western cherishes a more mysterious cowboy--nameless and inexplicable. Action rarely proceeds by the regular clock, but by a bent, surreal one. Right and wrong are not necessarily distinct categories. Cubistic camera angles disorient. Music doesn’t reinforce action as much as comment (often wryly) upon the characters and what they feel. These are dramas not viewed as morality plays, but as peeks into the irrational nature of the human psyche, which also happens to be the world that opera, an Italian invention, regularly inhabits.

So when it comes to opera, it is hardly surprising that Americans might want something a little closer to a Hollywood-style western than an Italian one, a more straightforward narrative art form. We depend upon projected titles that not only translate foreign librettos, but often turn poetry into plain prose. We favor naturalistic productions and costume drama over updating and abstraction.

And learning a thing or two about plotting for the lowest common denominator from the entertainment industry, we have even found a way to make new operas as consumed with conventional storytelling as mainstream movies and popular novels. The most successful new American opera with the public, Jake Heggie’s “Dead Man Walking,” which was given its premiere by the San Francisco Opera in September, offers mere docudrama. If you haven’t read the best-selling book or if you missed the Academy Award-winning film about Sister Helen Prejean’s spiritual ministering to a condemned murderer, by all means attend the opera.

Yet a performance last month of Mikel Rouse’s more imaginative use of music theater, “Failing Kansas”--which is based on Truman Capote’s book about condemned murderers, “In Cold Blood”--reminds us that the most exciting province of opera is not simple narrative, nor is narrative necessarily a litmus test of American art.

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“Dead Man Walking” and “Failing Kansas” are so different in content, style, technique, form and ambition that they hardly seem to be works of the same genre.

Heggie’s opera, with its libretto by Terrance McNally and naturalistic production, slavishly retells Prejean’s grisly tale on realistic sets with characters immediately recognizable from the book. In San Francisco, the final execution scene looked almost exactly like it does in the film (and that presumably is just what it looked like in the prison).

Heggie is known for fluid art songs in the mid-century American mold of Samuel Barber. In “Dead Man Walking,” he writes standard arias and ensemble numbers, and he includes instrumental music to create atmosphere and mood. He employs formal musical devices (many that we recognize from film, such as driving rhythms in the percussion) to advance the action, build to climax and express horror.

All of Heggie’s music is emotionally explicit. Give a murderer something agitated to sing, and maybe we will sense his capacity for humanity. Take away music altogether, as the executioner’s poison drips into his bloodstream, and we sense the ebbing away of life. Reflect the saintly nun’s feelings with great tenderness and heart-wrenching outburst tailor-made for the highly theatrical mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, and we are handed a satisfying moral dilemma.

We may shudder during the execution, but the opera also clearly tells us he should die. We may even leave the theater emotionally drained, but we feel good about the finality, about things working out as we know they should in a just nation. Difficult issues of life and death needn’t trouble us any longer through post-theater supper.

Like Heggie, Rouse has also based his career and his operas on songwriting, in his case going back and forth between making pop records and working in a more classical new music context. In fact, “Failing Kansas,” which is composed of nine long, pop-styled songs performed solely by Rouse (the lyrics and the prerecorded backgrounds are also by the composer), could almost be called a rock opera. Rouse moves among four positions on an empty stage, singing along with the prerecorded backgrounds, while a film of evocative imagery, only tangentially related to the specific story or events, is projected behind him.

Instead of recounting, in Capote’s cold-blooded detail, the murder of the Clutter family in Kansas and the execution of its two killers, “Failing Kansas” uses opera’s unique and disturbing ability to take us inside the heads of even the most unsympathetic characters. Neither sight nor sound precisely underscores the drama or reinforces whatever prejudices we may bring into the theater with us. And most important, Rouse’s maze-like and unpredictable music heeds opera’s essential irrationality.

Rouse might, for instance, stick to a single line of dialogue, one convict to another--”Hey, Perry, pass me a match”--and repeat it over and over to ingratiating rhythm, backbeat and harmonies. But the line also starts to snake back on itself, to break apart and set up a complex of counterpoints. Through it we sense how a mind gets stuck on something, and by going around in circles gradually becomes unglued. We are compelled, like it or not, to follow that mental journey.

In fact, what Rouse has done is infiltrate pop music with a strain of American opera that actually has nothing to do with narrative tradition but tends to strip away reality altogether--the stream-of-consciousness, spoken-sung style of Robert Ashley, the surreal plain-speaking and deceptively simple musical style of the Virgil Thomson-Gertrude Stein operas, and Philip Glass’ Minimalist music theater.

Without narrative, Rouse has no compunction to offer a too tidy resolution, or pat answers about crime and punishment or about life and death. And consequently, “Failing Kansas” paints a much truer slice of American life than does the simplistic “Dead Man Walking.” The capricious murder of the Clutter family in Kansas is part of a world that is both astonishingly intricate and random, and we don’t know where the ultimate connections lie; we don’t know what to conclude about it.

Narrative, plot and resolution have, of course, always been an operatic attraction. But in the best works, they are merely a framework, not the art’s essence.

Who, for instance, really cares to follow all the plotted ups and downs of what is often considered the most inspired and human comic opera ever written? Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” endures because Mozart’s music reveals something more than a conniving servant or two. The Count’s enlightenment comes through understanding Figaro--he never will understand a servant, but he can understand a person--and through that understanding, he can better know his own nature.

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The famous phrase for music’s operation in opera is as an agent for the suspension of disbelief. But there is little need to do much suspending in “Dead Man Walking,” everyone on stage looks believable and acts believably, while music accompanies them in their believable thoughts and actions. In “Failing Kansas,” however, the music is a magical, transformative art. We don’t need to see the characters onstage for them to enter our imaginations.

Furthermore, Rouse’s work demonstrates that such an operatic impulse may actually have the deeper connection to American culture, particularly to the finest aspects of pop culture. Anyone who grew up at a time when Bob Dylan first became popular will remember how, on first hearing, his long ballads, which Rouse’s songs sometimes resemble, didn’t make much sense. But they inspired repeated hearings, haunting the listener until conventional understanding was beside the point.

The problem with so much mainstream, big-ticket opera in America today is that it cannot rely on such trust, let alone fanaticism, from its audiences. “Dead Man Walking,” through its single-minded devotion to narrative as the most immediate form of entertainment, does not allow itself to go much deeper than a commercial film.

“Failing Kansas,” on the other hand, manipulates a more vernacular American musical style into a complex, non-narrative exploration of such dark American complexities, just the dark complexities that we hope our westerns will simplify.

Opera deals with higher truths. And the particular path that Rouse is exploring has much promise for the advancement of a new and, in its own right, distinctly American art form.