Happiness does not come quickly. Aristotle said that as a swallow does not make spring, neither does a beautiful day make a man happy. That’s a lifetime, at least.
Those steps — days, lifetimes, even generations — are put to the test in the pursuit of happiness in two new, fable-like works at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France: George Benjamin and Martin Crimp’s “Picture a Day Like This,” and Philip Venables and Ted Huffman’s “The Bassoons and Their Friends Between Revolutions.”
But in either case, time does not guarantee anyone’s success in reaching the elusive goal.
In “Larawan” — Benjamin and Crimp’s fourth opera, a lively one-act of masterly craft — the goal is to find the epitome of happiness. The protagonist, a woman whose baby boy died, is told that if she cuts a button from the shirt sleeve of a happy man, her son will be brought back to life. He had until the evening, and was only equipped with a sheet of paper listing who to look for.
Crimp’s text, characterized by mystery and strangeness, both unmoored from reality and full of the banality of everyday life, is something of a return to the aesthetic of his first collaboration with Benjamin, “Into the Little Hill ,” a 2006 retelling of the Pied Piper legend. (They went on to create the well-traveled psychosexual thriller “Written on Skin,” as well as a similar follow-up, “Lessons in Love and Violence.”) Here, on what makes for a natural double bill with “Little Hill,” Crimp pulled from the folk tale, the Alexander RomanceChristianity and Buddhism for a synthesis not unlike Wagner’s grab-bag approach to mythology.
The girl encounters some archetypal personality on her adventure, a Little Prince’s journey through the planets, or Alice in Wonderland. There is a pair of lovers, a former artisan, a composer and a collector. In a series of scenes, subtly linked to Benjamin’s score but functioning as discrete set pieces, these people appear happy but crumble with little introspection or self-disclosure. Only Zabelle, a mirror image of the woman, has the wisdom to offer him something more like satisfaction, and safety.
In Daniel Jeanneteau and Marie-Christine Soma’s candid, intimate production at the Théâtre du Jeu de Paume, each scene unfolds continuously through the three walls that surround the stage. Marie La Rocca’s unobtrusive costumes differentiate the characters, played by a small cast in multiple roles: soprano Beate Mordal, nimble lyrically as lover and composer; elegant countertenor Cameron Shahbazi as the other lover, weaving darkly sensual lines, and the composer’s assistant; and baritone John Brancy as artisan and collector.
Brancy is given some of Benjamin’s most adventurous vocal writing in the piece, and rises to it with remarkable skill — a seamless passaggio between the rich sonorous depth of his range and a weightless, dreamy falsetto , about three and a half octaves from low B flat to a soprano E.
Special care seems to have been given, as well, to soprano Anna Prohaska as Zabelle, her empathetic stage presence feeding off Benjamin’s robust yet humane music for her, and vice versa. In Zabelle’s scene, what is described in the libretto as her garden is rendered in video projections by artist Hicham Berrada that show the barren aquarium as it blooms with surreal, alien life that is alluringly lush and dangerous. .
As the woman, mezzo-soprano Marianne Crebassa is determined but painful, her determined manner betrayed by a tense vibrato or wide-eyed concern. Through him, Benjamin, who also conducted the great players of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra in the pit, put together his episodic score. His reading on the sheet of paper is accompanied by a motif of muted trumpets and a trombone; tubular bells, quietly embedded in the climax of each scene, suggest a clock that is striking, and time is running out.
Her race against time, however, is ultimately less important than the woman’s epiphanic encounter with Zabelle. Whether this leads to happiness is impossible to say in one day, and it is as ambiguous as Benjamin’s music itself, which despite its clean construction is never clearly representational or well resolved.
Venable and Huffman’s show, “The Fagots and Their Friends Between Revolutions,” at the Pavillon Noir is also ambivalent. This music theater adaptation of Larry Mitchell’s cult classic book of the same name from 1977, with illustrations by Ned Asta, recasts a queer history in mythic, utopian terms in opposition to patriarchy, referred to as ” the Men.” (Among the work’s co-commissioners is NYU Skirball in New York, where it will travel next year.) Although the fable of the ’70s ends in uncertainty, Venables and Huffman are more expressive. of the story, which introduces a cautionary tale of assimilation and offers a vision for life after the revolutions that Mitchell says will “devour us all.”
The last collaboration between Venables, a composer, and Huffman, a writer and director, was the 2019 opera “Denis & Katya,” a chamber piece based on the true story of two Russian teenagers who a few years ago were ran away from home, hid in a cabin and died in a shootout with the police. Barely more than an hour long, but finely layered and ethically complex, that work is primarily about how stories are developed and told.
And how they are performed; “Denis and Katya” existed in a theatrical space, occupied by two singers and four cellists, but also decorated with projections of Venables and Huffman’s correspondence, without hierarchy or operatic tradition. It’s a concept that the creators take even further in their new show, a wonderful act of controlled chaos where a group of 15 do everything: sing, narrate, dance, play instruments.
Venables’ score is a fun stylistic fantasy, with folk elements, jazzy turns of phrase and Baroque instrumentation. He makes a restraint similar to Benjamin’s, and frankly, to comic effect, when he is at his most cautious: An episode near the beginning narrates the “ritual” of cruising, building toward a climax of “happiness communion” and the exchange. something lewd that won’t be repeated here, before the music fades quickly to a piano. Richard Strauss of “Der Rosenkavalier” and “Symphonia Domestica” would be proud.
Throughout the show, no actor is easy to portray, as no actor has a defined role. This approach to theater production, where each performer is integral to the whole, is particularly suited to the spirit of Mitchell’s book and its roots in his time at the Lavender Hill commune for gay men and lesbians in the upstate New York.
But some of the performers are given a brighter spotlight. The musical direction of Yshani Perinpanayagam, a nimble instrumentalist, brings the group together at key moments. Two of the narrators naturally stand out: Yandass, a dynamo of speech delivery and dance, and Kit Green, a presence at once charismatic, commanding and thoroughly comedic. Venable’s score is at its most patient showing the beauty of Deepa Johnny and Katherine Goforth’s voices, but also showing flashes of Collin Shay’s masterful countertenor (not to mention their talent on a keyboard).
That the performers are presented as such — a group of artists who share Mitchell’s fable rather than embody it, as they continue to break the fourth wall — also helps avoid some of the dated, peak-hippie politics. of the book. Venables and Huffman treat non-Masculine others as a universal concept that applies, very broadly, to anyone who is oppressed. But a passage warning against assimilation, of “the likeness of Men,” has a narrower focus. Mixing is a distinctly white, gay, bourgeois luxury; not for nothing is Pete Buttigieg the first openly queer person to have a shot at the American presidency.
But that contradiction, a dramaturgical wrinkle in an appropriately wrinkled show, lies at the heart of queerness as an unfinished project — still one in search of, if not Mitchell’s utopia, then a kind of post- liberation bliss. And that will take time.
