Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The opera world has a tenuous understanding of the word “new”. Most new operas are just 19th-century dramas with contemporary clothing and technology, with little in the way of new narrative and musical means. What New York’s Prototype Festival of new and contemporary opera is supposed to offer is the latter, though it often settles for the former.The world premiere (at HERE Mainstage in Manhattan) of Eat the Document, from Dana Spiotta’s novel of the same name, opened this 12th festival with another opera in modern dress but archaic form. It looks into the before and after lives of Mary and Bobby, two anti-Vietnam radicals who kill someone with a bomb in the 1970s and then live undercover in the 1990s. Composer John Glover and librettist Kelley Rourke treat this as soap opera via bland, hectic Broadway-style rock. There are eight characters, little chance to differentiate them, much less explore them, and the best feature is Peiyi Wong’s set, which has the look, feel and scent of a used bookstore.★★☆☆☆The opening night of David T Little’s Black Lodge (at BRIC in Brooklyn) was preceded by the theatrical installation Bardo, with a snarling emcee riffing on slips of paper on which audience members had written their regrets and desires. Surrounded by rococo wraiths and Cabaret-style attendants, this was a dull and pretentious afterlife.But the festival turned around with Black Lodge. With a libretto by poet Anne Waldman and directed by Michael Joseph McQuilken, it depicts the bardo experience of the Man, after he has shot the Woman (charismatic actor and dancer Jennifer Harrison Newman), drawing on the life of William Burroughs, who reportedly killed his wife playing “William Tell”. Premiered in 2022, it is a monodrama on film, but at Prototype was screened with live playing from vocalist Timur (as the Man), the Isaura String Quartet and The Dime Museum rock band. Also inspired by French early-20th-century artist Antonin Artaud and David Lynch’s 1986 film Blue Velvet, it’s thrilling to see opera in a form that embraces film, experimental theatre and pop videos. Music, haunting images and cinematic editing combine to create a visceral impact. Black Lodge uses contemporary means to make scintillating contemporary opera.★★★★★Less radical but no less new is Christopher Cerrone’s In a Grove (at La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, Manhattan). This had a superb cast of soprano Mikaela Bennett and tenor Paul Appleby as newlyweds travelling through a forest, where they encounter a stranger in the form of baritone John Brancy. It’s an adaptation of the 1922 Ryūnosuke Akutagawa story that became Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon — death is at the core, each character retelling their experience as variations on a theme.With a foundation of ambient sound and vocal writing that underlines the most important moments with plangent harmonies, this is often mesmerising. The variations grow more meaningful and tragic as they pass, and the effect grows hypnotic. Although Cerrone could have gone even deeper, this was a moving experience, punctuated by librettist Stephanie Fleischmann’s line for the murder victim, “And so, ready to prove I was invincible . . . ” From this have come many tragedies.★★★★☆prototypefestival.org
