Long Beach Opera could not have found a more ideal setting for its time-defying production of The Library of Maps: An Opera in Many Parts than the Art Deco splendor of the RMS Queen Mary.
From the moment you crossed the gangplank onto the great ship’s Promenade Deck, you entered a different world, a floating historical relic where the ghostly spirits of generations mingled — from the glamour of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald to the wide-eyed wonder of today’s tourists. What better place to perform an opera where none of the traditional rules of time and space apply?
The Library of Maps began life as a collaboration between the late pioneering composer Pauline Oliveros and poet Moira Roth. The initial inspiration was a series of short stories by Roth about a fictional library unlike any other, but the opera soon grew to include 20 episodes, ranging from the intimate events of a single night to the course of history over centuries. The work premiered in an Oakland, California, studio in 2002 to an audience of 15 but was further expanded after that.
This production, according to LBO’s program book, was “recreated, assembled, and adapted” for the company by Artistic Director James Darrah and Music Director Christopher Rountree. Knowing Darrah and LBO, that phrase could mean almost anything, and The Library of Maps in this incarnation was clearly an homage to Oliveros rather than an attempt to reproduce or fix a permanent version of the opera. What came through were Oliveros’s lyrical vocal lines and unconventional use of sounds and silence, melded to Roth’s fantastical, science fiction-flavored poetry.
Saturday’s performance was inseparably linked to its setting onboard the great ocean liner. The cast consisted of nine singer-actor-musicians, including Darrah as the ship’s ever-attentive (and progressively more drunken) Deputy Captain, with Rountree as a toga-clad Philosopher who gradually transformed into a character like the Mad Hatter.
Staged in an ornate ballroom, with the audience seated at cabaret tables, the action — of which there was a lot — unfolded on the dance floor. When the lights dimmed, an elegant woman in a leopard-print cape (I-Chin Feinblatt, playing the Mute Woman) entered accompanied by a single chord from an accordion, Oliveros’s signature instrument.
After a lengthy silence designed to instill an atmosphere of “deep listening” (in Oliveros’s terminology), Feinblatt struck a small antique cymbal, producing a single crystalline note. As its sound died away, more passengers and crew arrived, each playing differently tuned crotales. The effect was celestial.
High up on the ship’s manifest was the effervescent Kathryn Shuman, dressed as a 1960s Day-Glo go-go girl, playing the all-important role of the Chief Librarian, serving as a guide and discovering the maps. Among the other passengers and crew were O-Lan Jones as the Duchess, Peter Kazaras as her self-satisfied Duke, Catherine Brookman as the ship’s perky Photographer, Paul Pinto as the Dreamer, and multi-instrumentalist M.A. Tiesenga as the Map Maker.
What began as a stately procession gradually unfolded like one of the road maps that gas stations used to give out — except that Roth’s libretto leads to much less precise destinations, with sections of the work titled “The Map of the Heart,” “The Map of the Cosmic World,” “The Child’s Map of Time,” and “The Unruly Map of Threads.”
As notes and words overlaid and built upon each other, Oliveros’s music and Roth’s poetry began to form a deeply complex sonic-dramatic tapestry. The tintinnabulation of the cymbals blended with the intermingling vocalizations from the decidedly quirky passengers and crew. Added to the singing and glistening percussion were multihued melodic lines that Tiesenga produced on a variety of reed instruments.
The arc of each section, while based on a predetermined framework, allowed for extended improvisation. Often Rountree could be seen coordinating tempos, entrances, transitions, and rising crescendos. A guiding principle of Oliveros’s musical ideology was that each performance should be individual and responsive to the moment. That sense of free-flowing energy was in abundance on Saturday.
It was more difficult to divine what was going on dramatically under Darrah’s direction. As the fictional ocean voyage progressed, enhanced by Prairie T. Trivuth’s set design and Chrisi Karvonides-Dushenko’s costumes, the atmosphere gradually descended into a madcap celebration — imagine the ghostly ball in Titanic colliding with the stateroom scene from the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera.
Champagne was uncorked, streamers flew, and the music turned from melodic to raucous, amplified by the rumbling of electronic effects. At one point, the characters ran around the stage in circles that evoked the Caucus-race from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Did it all make sense? Was it even meant to? It didn’t matter: This was an immersive experience no spectator was likely to forget. At the end, as we were leaving, there was Oliveros’s image glowing on the screen of an antique television, accordion in hand. She appeared to be smiling.
