Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town’ premiered in 1938, but the playwright’s groundbreaking theater piece had to wait nearly sixty years to be reworked into an opera. Wilder’s executors turned down a number of proposals over the years, but finally entrusted the job to librettist J.D. McClatchy and composer Ned Rorem.

 

A partnership between Indiana University, the Aspen Music Festival, the Lake George Opera Company and the North Carolina School for the Arts produced the commission, joined by two other commissioning partners, Opera Boston & Festival Opera of California. The first performances of ‘Our Town’ the Opera took place in February, 2006 at Indiana University. This week, the Ohio premiere will hit the stage at Baldwin-Wallace from February 11-14, guest directed by two veterans of the opera stage, Beth Greenberg and Lucy Arner. We spoke with both directors separately by telephone.

 

Beth Greenberg, the stage director, has many credits for productions at New York City Opera and around the world, and made a splash in the news for her recent production of Puccini’s ‘Il Tabarro’ on a retired oil tanker moored in a harbor in New York. Having already directed the 2007 west coast premiere of Rorem’s opera with Festival Opera in Walnut Creek, Ca, she was brought into the project by her longtime colleague Lucy Arner. “So I’m coming back to the piece, which is a luxury for a director. You know the piece already and you can take it to the next level and enrich it even more. It’s a great work for younger singers – college age singers are just about perfect because of the ages of George and Emily, and the music is classic Ned Rorem. He’s always stayed wonderfully true to his own voice, which to my ear is distinctly American and contemporary as well. It’s rich, it’s fresh sounding and it’s quite often beautiful”.

 

Much depends on the central role of the Stage Manager. “As you know, he really carries the piece on his shoulders, so you need a very fine singing actor, and we’re lucky to have two young talented singers in that role. Sometimes he sings, but as you can imagine, it’s a very long role and so there are certain pieces of text that are just spoken. Not every word of text in the play is set, and not every character in the play appears in the opera”.

 

Staging ‘Our Town’ is a challenge because of Wilder’s intentional minimalism. “The very first two sentences of the play read ‘no curtain, no scenery’. In the thirties when Wilder wrote it, it was a revolution in American theater to have no practical set. In these economic times, it’s the ideal opera to do – all you need onstage is a chair! For me as a director, it’s a wonderful challenge for your actors to become magicians and create Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire by gestures and movement and make the audience believe that what they’re seeing is very rich. The Opera is concerned with big issues of life and death, time and space, of how we live in this world. The pivotal event is Emily’s death in childbirth. Where is the line between birth and death? How do we make ourselves aware of every moment of life and how precious it is? What happens to us after we die? I thought about our lives on earth and how we would represent that earth. We’ve created a disc for the playing space. It looks earthlike and is mirrored in various ways. The moon reflects off the earth, another globe leads out into the galaxy and the stars”.

 

Ms. Greenberg has the assistance of a “wonderful” set designer in Laura Carlson, and equally talented costume (Charlotte Yetman) and lighting (Jeff Lockshine) designers. “They’re bubbling with ideas. We anchor the period (1901-1913) with costumes, but then you’ll see these lives being played out in a way that looks very abstract. I like to play with the tension between these real life people and their visual space”.

 

And working conditions at the college have been nearly ideal. “We’ve had the advantage at B-W of being able to rehearse on the set in the theater from day one – January 15 – when we began staging. That never happens in opera!”

 

 

Lucy Arner, music director, is a 1977 graduate of Baldwin-Wallace. “This project is appealing to me on lots of levels, not all of them musical. There’s lots of small town in my background – both Ravenna where I grew up and Berea where I went to college -- and also Bloomington is a small town. I wanted to get back in touch with my four special years here.”

 

Part of what made those years special was Lucy Arner’s relationship with Sophie Ginn, who taught voice at Baldwin-Wallace from 1968 until her death at the age of 75 last summer. “As a piano major, I was assigned to her studio as a freshman – one of my first accompanying jobs. We hit it off and she taught me a lot.” And her mentor steered her in the direction of vocal coaching which she continued to study at Indiana University, in Germany and at the University of Miami. Eventually she served as assistant conductor, vocal coach, rehearsal accompanist and harpsichordist at the Metropolitan Opera for more than thirteen years.

 

“Stuart Raleigh, the longtime director of musical theater at B-W retired a couple of years ago, so when this project came up, Sophie Ginn suggested me,” Ms. Arner recalls. “I didn’t know the piece at all, but I thought the project was really interesting!”

 

Auditions for the cast were recorded on DVD’s in Berea and reviewed in New York by the two directors. “We decided to doublecast two roles, so there are two Stage Managers and two Emily’s. We shared our choices with the voice faculty, and I came to Berea at the end of October for startup rehearsals – and to attend Sophie’s memorial service, which made it a very bittersweet experience.”

 

Once they got down to the planning stage, the directors took one decision to tighten up the opera. “It’s a three act piece which we’re doing in two acts: the first and second will be done together, then the third, George and Emily’s wedding, will follow intermission. We tried to consolidate and pace the first two acts so they go in a very clear and direct line, culminating in the cemetery scene. There are so many flashbacks that it’s a real challenge to make it clear what’s narrative, what’s happening in real time and what happened in the past.”

 

Rorem’s musical conception faithfully preserves the word-dominant character of the play, where a whole world is created through language. “The music is very episodic and doesn’t really intrude on the flow of the text. I wanted to make the words the star not only by deciding not to use supertitles, but by choosing tempi that make the words work as effectively as possible. The audience should feel that they’re sitting through a play as well as an opera – like ‘Tosca’, which most people don’t even realize was originally a play.”

 

That task is helped out by the orchestration, which is modest and transparent and doesn’t force the voices of young singers to project through a lot of sound. “There are two flutes, two clarinets, one oboe, one bassoon, three horns, solo trumpet, a big piano part, no percussion and a small string section.”

 

Ms. Arner finds the music an almost perfect match for the play. “It’s very Rorem, with bits and flashes I liken to Poulenc, with a small bit of Copland and a tiny bit of -- I guess you could call it Bernstein. It’s as intricate as Sondheim in many ways but doesn’t have the catchy tunefulness of Bernstein. It’s not an easy piece to describe in words. It lives in its own little world.”