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CFA’s Fringe Festival offers in-your-face opera and theater
By David J. Craig
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| James Petosa, a CFA professor and director of the school of theatre arts (left), is directing La Tragédie de Carmen as part of this year’s Fringe Festival. Stephanie Chigas (CFA’05), a singer in the Opera Institute, plays Carmen, and William Lumpkin, a CFA assistant professor of music, is musical director. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky | |
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Director Peter Brook’s 1975 adaptation of Georges Bizet’s
Carmen treats the trappings of the 19th-century opera masterpiece like
so much ballyhooed poppycock. Stripping down its cast, plot, and score
to bare essentials, Brook’s one-act La Tragédie de Carmen has delighted and scandalized critics precisely because it downplays
traditional opera’s elaborate presentation and highlights the story’s
emotional grit. That makes La Tragédie an obvious choice for CFA’s
annual Fringe Festival.
“
The Fringe Festival puts on experimental plays and operas that do away
with the spectacle of mainstage productions and instead attempt something
very grounded, available, and earthy,” says James Petosa, a CFA
professor and director of the school of theatre arts. As part of this
year’s festival, he is directing La Tragédie de Carmen,
which takes place weekends beginning October 10 and runs through October
26 at the BU Theatre, Studio 210, at 264 Huntington Ave.
“
La Tragédie de Carmen reminds me of the social realist
films of Fellini’s early period, where characters are seductive
because of their needs, their passions, and their humanity,” says
Petosa. “The
story of how Carmen uses her sexuality, and then is undone by the fact
that that is the only power she can wield, is made very real and palpable.
Audiences are going to see human lives that are not separate from their
own. And they’re going to fall in love with characters in this
opera, fall out of love with them, feel sympathetic towards them, judgmental
of them, and be surprised by the reversal of fortune that occurs to them — the
whole panoply of dramatic responses.”
The Fringe Festival is a collaboration
between CFA’s Opera Institute
and school of theatre arts. It also features productions of the opera
Seven Deadly Sins, which was originally conceived by composer
Kurt Weill and playwright Bertolt Brecht as a sung ballet, and Peter
Weiss’ play
Marat/Sade. All performers are BU students.
The festival’s productions
are performed in a small black-box theater with about 100 seats wrapped
around three sides of the stage. Sets are
not elaborate, in part because the festival’s pieces are performed
in quick succession on some dates. But minimalism is integral to the
festival’s aesthetic, and costumes are simple as well. “There’s
no pretense, and very little that separates the audience from the performers,” says
Petosa. “It makes for a dangerous intimacy.”
In the one-act
operas that have comprised the festival since its 1996 creation — it
includes a play for the first time this year — choruses
and orchestras are pared down dramatically or eliminated altogether.
Whereas Bizet’s Carmen calls for an orchestra of 50 musicians and
Brook’s adaptation about 12, for example, the singers in BU’s
production will be accompanied by just two pianos and a cello.
The festival
was created, in part, to provide a low-pressure atmosphere where young
singers and actors can perform experimental operas and plays
that are not frequently produced, and tackle challenging roles that they
might lack the experience for in a mainstage opera. But its stripped-down
productions present performers with serious challenges, says William
Lumpkin, a CFA assistant professor of music, and the music director of
La Tragédie de Carmen.
“
Carmen is a tough sing, no matter what version you’re
doing,” he
says. “And the Brook version in some ways is even tougher on the
singers than the full opera because they have many fewer breaks. Opera
singers are accustomed to singing a little bit and then being able to
go back offstage and have a drink of water when the chorus is on stage,
for instance, but in this version they’re on the stage the entire
time. Over the course of the opera’s 82 minutes, Carmen is probably
singing 75 percent of the time. It makes for a more intense experience,
both for the performers and the audience.”
Singers’ skills
also are tested by the intimacy of the stage. “You’re
more under a microscope than if you’re on a big stage in front
of 2,000 people, because the audience is right up against you,” says
David Cushing (CFA’04), a second-year student in the Opera Institute,
which is a postgraduate training program. In La Tragédie de
Carmen,
which will be performed in French, Cushing plays the bullfighter Escamillo,
a romantic interest of the femme fatale Carmen. “They see every
gesture you make,” he says. “If you raise an eyebrow, it
has to mean something. It can’t just be the aftereffect of singing.”
The
actors also can exploit that intimacy. “You can play to the
crowd a lot more easily,” Cushing says. “One tactic I use
is picking out people in the audience and making eye contact with them,
in order to break down that wall between myself and the audience. Then,
you’re really emoting and sharing with them.”
For Clay Hopper
(CFA’04), who is in his second year of the school
of theatre arts graduate directing program, the Fringe Festival brought
the chance to direct Marat/Sade, a two-act play-within-a-play
that tells the fictional story of the Marquis
de Sade directing a dramatization — in the Charenton lunatic asylum
— about the murder of the French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat.
Marat/Sade is not commonly produced, in part because of its convoluted
plot.
To bring emotional continuity to its wild series of scenes, the
performance
will rely heavily on percussion instruments such as wood blocks, bells,
whistles, and hand drums to focus on “the rhythm of the text, the
movements, and the staging,” Hopper says. “Because there
is no story in a traditional sense, you need to use every means at your
disposal to bring themes into sharp relief, and I thought that rhythm
was one way to keep the audience’s attention.”
Seven Deadly
Sins, about a tragic female character who acquires wealth through her
immoral behavior, will be directed by guest director David
Gately, whose style Lumpkin describes as “very experimental, very
dark.” It will feature CFA Assistant Professor of Music Allison
Voth as music director.
“
These pieces will bring something special out of our students, and provide
audiences with a unique experience,” says Petosa. “They are
all suited for our kind of laboratory work.”
For a complete performance
schedule and for information about ordering tickets for the Fringe Festival,
visit http://www.bu.edu/cfa/calendar/music/index.html,
or call 617-
353-5201.
3
October 2003
Boston University
Office of University Relations