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REVIEW Through a Glass Darkly Monsters of Grace is meant to be a revolutionary vision of the future of opera. It doesn't live up to all its promises, but it's unlike anything you've ever seen. BY JAMES McQUILLEN jmcquillen@wweek.com |
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Nearly 25 years ago, composer Philip Glass and theater director and designer Robert Wilson made Einstein on the Beach, a cryptic, nearly five-hour meditation on light, time and train travel. With its quasi-hallucinatory imagery, Glass' distinctive music and a libretto based on numbers and solfège syllables, it was a revolutionary work that pushed the operatic envelope. The two have worked together several times since then, but none of their collaborations has been as eagerly anticipated as Monsters of Grace, which played in Portland last week. Even before it was completed, many voices--and not just those involved in the production--were calling it another Einstein, a vision of the future of opera. Now that it's come and gone, however, we can rest assured that lightning doesn't strike in the same place twice. The work's title suggests a kind of inhuman ethereality, which pretty well describes the Glass/Wilson aesthetic. Monsters of Grace features slow-mo interactions between wildly disparate elements, accompanied by pulsing, repeated melodic elements; to that extent, audiences knew what to expect when they took their seats at the Schnitz. Just what form this trippy, dreamy spectacle would take wasn't so clear. It was billed as a "digital opera in three dimensions" with a cast of "Synthespians™," which the publicity materials described as "life-like, three-dimensional, computer-generated characters created by Kleiser-Walczak Construction Company that are projected onto a large screen via 70mm stereoscopic film." That's a long-winded and obfuscatory way of saying that Monsters of Grace is an animated film you watch through 3-D glasses, and it's accompanied by music. Perhaps the alternative wording was meant to distance the images from other animated or 3-D characters, such as Homer Simpson and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Wilson intended the images to resist meaning. I'm relieved I knew that beforehand, because otherwise I'd have been up all night trying to figure out the connections between a boy on an antique bicycle, a helicopter flying over the Great Wall and a slumbering polar bear. (I know it was a bear only because I read about it in a magazine; some people thought it was a rat. Without the Coke bottle, who can tell?) While they don't mean anything, certain scenes carry references one can't deny. Much of the film looks like a Magritte painting that moves at a creep, as though animated by Andrei Tarkovsky. And even if Wilson hadn't intended homage to Luis Buñuel in a scene of a scalpel slowly slicing the palm of an enormous amputated hand, the association is inescapable. Not all the echoes are of surrealists per se. At one point an enormous foot descends; I couldn't help but think of the Sousa march that accompanied the credits of Monty Python's Flying Circus. As dazzling as it sometimes is, much of the imagery is monochromatic and dark, and the designer 3-D specs don't help to ease the eye strain. Maybe it was just the effect of the rich amplification in the Schnitz, where the acoustics are less than ideal, but I found myself also straining to make out the lyrics I was hearing. Normally I dislike the visual obtrusiveness of supertext (words projected above the stage), but here it would have been a help. It would also have helped if the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, which sponsored the show, had included the libretto in the program. Considering that it's made up of only 13 verses by the Persian mystic Jelaluddin Rumi, any one of which would fit neatly on a cocktail napkin, it wouldn't have been a great effort. There is greater sonority and more drama in Monsters of Grace than in much of Glass' music. With clean lyrical lines, the vocal writing feels more idiomatic than that of his earlier works, and the sampling of Middle Eastern instruments gives the synthesizers a more interesting texture than you might expect. But the music shares the film's lack of a human. Frankly, I don't trust music that can't be played during a power outage, but even rock, which depends more than most genres on the availability of electrical outlets, has a spirit that comes through even when unplugged. The most convincing--i.e., the most human--renditions of Glass' music I've heard are the recordings by the Kronos Quartet. There are singers and non-electrified instruments in the Philip Glass Ensemble, but synthesized sound is at its core. Monsters of Grace is an important work, even if it's not quite what it's cracked up to be. It's not exactly an opera; it's more of a song cycle on the scale of Schoenberg's arrangement of Das Lied von der Erde. It's not what we generally consider an animated film, even if it does offer a simultaneous view of three generations of cinema: the high-tech product, the '50s-style specs and the silent film accompanied by an orchestra in the pit. But no other work to date has so fully embraced the ghost in the machine as a co-creator. Monsters of Grace is thus far the supreme artistic expression of the digital age.
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