Tragedies of Sex
The Rape of Lucretia throws a challenging, controversial test at the HoustonGrand Opera
Jacques Imbrailo as Tarquinius and Michelle DeYoung as Lucretia in the HoustonGrand Opera's production of The Rape of LucretiaPhoto by Felix Sanchez
From the Houston Grand Opera's production of The Rape of Lucretia, MichelleDeYoung as Lucretia and Ryan McKinny as CollatinusPhoto by Felix Sanchez
From left, Judith Forst, Ryan McKinny, Lauren Snouffer, Ryan McKinny, MichelleDeYoung and Joshua Hopkins in the Houston Grand Opera's production of The Rapeof LucretiaPhoto by Felix Sanchez
We love to watch a fallen woman fall. What about a rape? A suicide?
Challenges abound with Houston Grand Opera's ambitious new production of Benjamin Britten's 1946 The Rape of Lucretia, which follows hard upon the heels of the company's masterfully performed La Traviata by Giuseppe Verdi. The Rape of Lucretia runs Friday through Feb. 11 at the Wortham Theater Center.
Where La Traviata tells the tale of a courtesan reformed by love who tragically succumbs to social disapproval and consumption, The Rape of Lucretia tells of the sexual violation and suicide of the virtuous Lucretia. The political consequences of this act signaled the end of monarchical tyranny and the birth of the Roman republic.
It could be very interesting to see HGO tackle more directly controversial social issues. One wonders if this will be the trend under Summers.
Traviata and Lucretia are tragedies of sex by virtuoso composers, as is Mozart's Don Giovanni, which returns to the HGO next season. Opera is full of violence and sex. Yet not even Mozart scripts the rape that sets that opera's chain of events in motion. The English National Opera's 2010 Don Giovanni provoked outrage by including two rape scenes.
Britten's The Rape of Lucretia may not be so extreme as the rape, double-murder and public execution staged in Jake Hegge's Dead Man Walking, which was performed by the HGO just last season. Yet The Rape of Lucretia's rape-suicide and a series of unusual features place it alongside other challenging Britten operas staged recently in Houston.
Billy Budd, Britten's adaptation of Herman Melville's sea-faring tale of homosexual panic and murder, was the first of HGO's series. Next was HGO's production of Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Although Shakespeare's comedy is thought of as light, humorous, fairy-filled play appropriate for children, it is also full of sex, violence and perversion. The Turn of the Screw and Peter Grimes, Britten's adaptations of Henry James and George Crabbe, orbit around the mistreatment and suspicious deaths of children.
It's no wonder Britten has a problem of perception.
Although critically acclaimed, these masterworks are hardly the most performed in the world of opera. You can check the statistics yourself at Operabase, including the most performed composers and operas worldwide of the last five years.
Britten ranks 13th with 289 performances compared to Verdi's No. 1 rank with 2,259. The Rape of Lucretia ranks 115 with 29 performances. La Traviata's ranks No. 2 with 447 performances just behind Mozart's The Magic Flute.
Even HGO seems to have had enough, after five of a planned six-year Britten series. The company confirmed that next season's previously scheduled production of Britten's Gloriana would be replaced by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein's Show Boat.
Asked to comment on this decision, HGO artistic and music director Patrick Summers responded in a written statement.
"I am enormously proud of our series of Benjamin Britten operas, and feel they have represented the company at its best. But in reviewing next season when I became Artistic Director seven months ago, I decided I wanted to take the company in the direction of more American repertoire, and I decided to change Britten's Gloriana into the landmark American operetta Showboat, for a plethora of artistic reasons."
No wonder Britten has a problem of perception. Although critically acclaimed, these masterworks are hardly the most performed in the world of opera.
It's hard to know what Summers's "plethora of artistic reasons" might be or how to take this sudden patriotic swing towards an "operetta" some revere as an early instance of racial integration on the stage and some revile as racist. It could be very interesting to see HGO tackle more directly controversial social issues. One wonders if this will be the trend under Summers.
Difficult can be an artist's best friend even if it doesn't make for a box office boom. And Britten had the capacity to turn challenging material and dramaturgy into visionary triumphs.
First-time director
Arin Arbus has the enviable, or unenviable, task of staging the haunting, spare two-act The Rape of Lucretia in her operatic directing debut. Arbus, an experienced director of Shakespeare's works, spoke about the challenges of The Rape of Lucretia.
We watch Lucretia ready for bed, fall asleep and wake up in the arms of her rapist, Tarquinius. How to handle such brutality? For Arbus, who often directs Shakespeare's plays, this at least was no problem.
“I love that stuff!" Arbus said. "I love intimate violence on the stage — what could be better than that?"
The challenge was more often practical.
"I was worried about the rape scene," she said, "because it’s a long time to sustain this kind of tension. As soon as I started working on it with Michelle [De Young] and Jacques [Imbrailo], it was not a problem. We have a great fight director, Brian Byrnes."
Subject matter isn't the only problem, of course. "The male and female chorus — those are challenges," Arbus admitted, referring to a fascinating feature of Ronald Duncan's libretto, which was based on André Obey's Le Viol de Lucrece. Two characters, a Male and Female Chorus, sung by Anthony Dean Griffey and Leah Crocetto, alternatively narrate and witness the violent events unfolding before them.
What's a Greek chorus doing in a Roman tale often understood as an allegory of the trauma of World War II? Arbus answered this question with her own ingenuity.
"The libretto says they are not allowed to participate in the action, and I didn’t listen to that," she said. "The big question for me was, 'Why are they telling this story? What do they need to tell this story?' "
Arbus said, "You have the audience on stage, in a sense. You have these two witnesses who are leading us into the story and having their own breakdowns. But they never disappear."
All of which keeps us from distancing ourselves from the violence we see.
As Arbus put it, "What ultimately you’re seeing on stage is yourself."
