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music by Juliet Palmer, libretto by Julie Salverson, directed by Keith Turnbull

Tapestry Opera, Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto

June 12-15, 2014

“The Story of a Nuclear Family”

           

Shelter, the latest opera by Juliet Palmer, had its world premiere in Edmonton in 2012.  A coproduction between Tapestry Opera and Edmonton Opera, Shelter is now receiving its Toronto premiere.  Palmer’s music blends a hosts of musical styles from classical to rock, but Julie Salverson’s libretto alternates between being serious and satirical without successfully uniting the two.  The result is an allegory about the birth of the atomic age that tells us nothing new about its subject.

The opera begins with the introduction of its only historical character, Austrian scientist Lise Meitner (1878-1968), who co-discovered nuclear fission in 1939.  Her colleague Otto Hahn won the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for that discovery which many now think should have been given, or at least co-awarded, to Meitner.  Meitner (Andrea Ludwig) sings of her love of mathematics and of the beauty of science.  Of nuclear fission she grows lyrical about the possibility of dividing the indivisible.  (The word “atom” in Greek means “indivisible”.) 

This prologue is followed by the comic mating ritual of Claire (Christine Duncan) and Thomas (Andrew Love), who may be Americans or Canadians of the 1950s.  The randy, lei-bedecked Claire is keen to get the straight-laced Thomas in bed.  The funniest moment of Salverson’s libretto comes when the couple have their first kiss and Claire immediately becomes pregnant and starts going into labour.  Claire gives birth to a baby girl they call Hope, whose most noticeable feature is that she glows. 

After Meitner tells us about fleeing Nazi Germany for asylum in Sweden, a coup de théâtre shows us Hope (Teiya Kasahara) grow from baby to 21-year-one in two seconds.  She emerges as a rebellious young woman who resents her parents having kept her hidden from the outside world.  To tie Meitner’s story to Hope’s, Salverson moves from history to fiction and has Thomas hire Meitner to be his daughter’s private tutor.  No tutoring ever happens, however, since Meitner receives a letter asking her to join the Manhattan Project in order to create the atomic bomb.  She adamantly refuses.

Meanwhile, a Pilot (Keith Klassen), following his Geiger counter readings, arrives at Claire and Thomas’s house on a mission.  While the parents greet the Pilot as their new son-in-law, Meitner warns of the danger of his taking Hope away.  yet, he does so and as the opera ends she is being dropped over Hiroshima. 

Salverson’s allegory obviously derives from a pun on the phrase “nuclear family”.  This unit of man, woman and child, touted by conservatives as the essential building block of society, like the atom, is shown as fissile.  To break it up is, literally and figuratively, to take away Hope.

The allegory might seem simple enough, but how Palmer and Salverson depict it is rife with confusion.  The duo want to raise our awareness of the historical Meitner, satirize the values of the 1950s and point to the atomic bomb as the beginning of end of humanity.  As for their final goal, they are sixty or so years too late.  The Ban the Bomb movement in the 1960s, novels like Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957) and films like Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964) already did that.

In making fun of the conservative, conformist 1950s, the creators choose an easy target.  Salverson’s main insight of highlighting the nuclear aspect of the ideal “nuclear family” may seem clever but doesn’t work out allegorically.  If Hope represents atomic power, then who are her parents and why are they North American?  Electricity was generated by a nuclear reactor for the first time in the US but the world’s first nuclear power plant opened in the Soviet Union.  In either case, what does it mean that Hope’s parents have kept her hidden for 21 years?  The idea of harnessing radioactivity as power happened shortly after the discovery of radium in 1898, with interest renewed after the discovery of nuclear fission.

Palmer and Salverson’s serious and satiric goals wreak havoc with chronology.  If the opera ends with the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, why does the satire of Hope’s parents place them in the 1950s?  Designer Sue LePage places fold-out identical miniature houses along the floor to represent the boom of suburbia in the 1950s.  The ’50s is also the period of the curled-up hairdo, the tiered petticoated dress and the umbrellaed cocktail that LePage gives Claire.  But in this, LePage is only following Palmer’s music that references the big band sound, the Latin dance craze and the male crooning styles of the 1950s.

Meitner receives her invitation to join the Manhattan Project which began in 1942 in the same scene Hope announces she is 21.  If the libretto followed any logic, that means Hope’s parents would have to have met in 1921.  One could claim that in a surreal allegory, chronology is irrelevant.  This explanation, however, won’t do since Salverson includes an historical character who is not treated satirically.  The result is that the satire and surrealism undermine the opera’s ultimate seriousness.  Meitner is such a fascinating figure, it would have been better to write an opera exclusively devoted to her and how the male members of the Nobel committee were unwilling to recognize her achievement. 

Besides, these difficulties, Salverson never depicts the nuclear family as stable in the first place.  Keith Turnbull’s stage direction shows Thomas willing to smother the baby Hope shortly after her birth.  If the nuclear family is happy, we don’t see it.  Hope, herself, is depicted as a punk rocker, oddly enough, from the 1980s.  She is ready to rebel against her parents as soon as she is able.  As for the opera’s title, the mention of the 1950s plus atomic power immediately evokes the fallout shelters families were encouraged to build.  Yet, since the action stops in 1945, Salverson never deals with this topic nor the aspects of fear and guilt that the US felt after unleashing the atomic bomb. 

If there are problems with the libretto, Palmer’s music is always imaginative.  Her six-member ensemble, well conducted by Leslie Dala, includes, at times, two electric guitars.  One of the score’s best accomplishments is how well it integrates both acoustic and electronic instruments.  Whatever one may think of the 1950s setting, Palmer draws on it in many ways – sometimes in outright imitation of 1950s pop with the percussionist moving over to play at a drum kit, sometimes merely in jazzing up her melodic lines. 

Of all the characters, Palmer gives the Pilot the most seductive music, only made more attractive by its use of crooning techniques of the period.  Keith Klassen gives a wonderful performance of this music and integrates the crooning techniques perfectly to lend suavity to his already smooth rich tenor. 

The music for Thomas but especially Claire is characterized by ’50s dance music.  Neither has the kind of extended arias Hope or the Pilot do, but are confined rather to short vocal exchanges.  This is a pity since they are the characters we know least about.  Andrew Love and Christine Duncan give lively interpretations of the two.  Duncan is a natural comedienne but her volume level is often below that of the other singers.

The most fully rounded character is Meitner likely because Salverson has a real biography to draw upon.  While Salverson has Meitner explain her past, including her escape to Sweden, we do have to wonder how these details are relevant if Salverson is later going to fictionalize her life by making her a private tutor in North America.  Palmer associates Meitner with the sonority and long lines of music by Johannes Brahms.  This does mean her declamation tends to lend each word the same amount of stress, but also provides a fine showcase for Andrea Ludwig’s lovely voice that combines darkness of hue with clarity of tone. 

The most attractive feature of the production is the video projections of Ben Chaisson.  Designer Sue LePage has defined the central playing area with a large white circle and has placed another large white circle over it tilted toward the audience.  Chaisson begins with projections of a view of outer space on both circles, which then are overwritten with a myriad of mathematical equations as Meitner sings of her love of science.  The projections show a house being drawn identical to those on stage when Claire and Thomas sing of home and always reflect the ideas put forward in the lyrics without intruding on the action.

Palmer’s work has always been inventive from the sewing-machine opera Stitch (2008) to the female boxing opera Voice-Box (2010) to this.  Shelter is the longest and most conventional of the three, suggesting that Palmer does best with unconventional, plotless material.  Shelter, which took ten years to be produced, feels as if it has gestated so long and been revised so often that it has lost clarity along the way.  Let’s hope her next opera reaches the stage much sooner.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: (from top) Andrea Ludwig as Lise Meitner, Christine Duncan as Glaire and Andrew Love as Thomas; Teiya Kasahara as Hope and Keith Klassen as the Pilot. ©2014 Tapestry Opera.

For tickets, visit https://tapestryopera.com.