Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
✭✭✭✭✩
by Aaron Gervais, directed by Tom Diamond
Tapestry Opera, Imperial Oil Opera Theatre, 227 Front Street East, Toronto
May 24-30, 2017
Alexander: “Forgiveness is a form of freedom”
Tapestry Opera’s Oksana G. is not only the largest scale opera the company has presented since Iron Road in 2001 but one of its most successful. The opera has an emotionally gripping libretto by playwright Colleen Murphy about the important subject of sex trafficking set to an immediately attractive score by Edmonton-born composer Aaron Gervais. Gervais does not shy away from traditional aspects of opera such as choruses and duets but he does seem reluctant to push the few solos he offers his leads into fully fledged arias. Were he to do so, Oksana G. would have even greater impact that it already does.
In 2006 Tapestry presented a 14-minute-long piece called The Enslavement and Liberation of Oksana G. as part of its collection of short operas called “Opera To Go”. The scene featured a dialogue between Oksana, a young Ukrainian women who had been sold into the sex trade but had escaped to a refuge in Italy, and Alessandro, the priest running the refuge. The difficulty was that Oksana was falling in love with the priest who in turn was tempted by his desire for Oksana. To make things worse, Konstantin, Oksana’s pimp who has been searching for her, finds her.
We next meet Oksana (Natalya Gennadi) in 1997 along with her best friend Natalia (Jacqueline Woodley) and Natalia’s friend Pavlo (Aaron Sheppard) just after Oksana and Natalia’s final classes at high school. Oksana dreams of going to university. Natalya dreams of being a wife and mother. The sex trafficker Konstantin (Keith Klassen) has already seen the girls and asks Pavlo to introduce him. Konstantin makes an offer that seems too good to be true. He claims he is recruiting women to work at a Bulgarian resort as chambermaids. The pay is more than girls could ever get in Ukraine. For some strange reason the girls must decide that very evening to go with Konstantin to be driven to Bulgaria. Without checking Konstantin’s credentials or questioning the urgency, Oksana’s parents agree and the two girls depart that night. This is one of the weakest scenes of the opera since it tries to do too much in too short a time – both introducing us to the main characters and then whisking them away in a fairly unbelievable manner.
In the next scene, Natalia is being gang-raped off-stage and Konstantin apologizes to Oksana for having to rape her too. This is the clearest sign that Konstantin has fallen in love with Oksana, albeit in his own perverted way that is more akin to obsession and possession than true love.
After Oksana and other trafficked women are sold at an auction in Greece, they await their transfer by boat from Albania to Italy. One of the women, Lyuba (Andrea Ludwig), knows of a refuge for women in Brindisi run by a Canadian priest and tells the women they can escape the men by jumping overboard and swimming to shore. We soon discover that Oksana has done this and has made her way to the safehouse run by Father Alexander (Adam Fisher). Just as she is beginning to feel that she has regained some of her humanity, Alexander and she realize that Konstantin has traced her to his house. Here the machinery of Murphy’s plot becomes rather too obvious and the way the opera ends for Oksana is far from a necessity.
Many famous operas (e.g., Verdi’s Il trovatore) rely on plot contrivances masquerading as fate, but in Oksana G. where Murphy clearly wants to make a statement about the horrors of sex trafficking, such contrivances undercut the effectiveness of her message. And Murphy, as do too many North American playwrights, definitely has a message. She gives Alexander an entire aria about dedicating his life to helping trafficked women by setting up safehouses instead of letting the opera speak for itself.
If there are flaws in Murphy’s libretto, there is little to fault in Aaron Gervais’s music except to say that it is sometimes too gorgeous for its lurid subject matter, a statement one might also make of Richard Strauss’s Salome. Gervais’s idiom is like a modern version of impressionism that has been influenced by minimalism. Sequences often begin with bell-like notes and then proceed to create a melodic line from the overtones of those notes. It is impressionist in its attention to shifting orchestral colours. It is minimalist in its use of repetition. Though often extremely delicate, Gervais can pile up layers of sound and increase the tempo of repetition to reflect outrage at the events happening on stage. One especially effective scene is the sex slave market in Greece where Gervais invokes the steady beat of disco music but increasingly infuses it with menace.
Another virtue of the score is Gervais’s willingness to shape dialogues into duet and individual statements of a group of characters into a full-blown chorus. A wonderful example of the latter is when the women awaiting transport to Italy imagine themselves floating in the water calling out their names. Gervais builds this section into a chorus that emphasizes female power and worth.
Strangely, given that he not shunned older operatic forms, Gervais only introduces arias in the second act. The first of these is Konstantin’s where he muses on the paradox of his love for Oksana. Given the complex characters Murphy has created, it seems only natural that her characters would be moved to reflect on what is happening to them. Konstantin’s aria could have been much longer since the nature of “love” to him is so confused. Oksana, on finding shelter at last, could quite naturally have been given an aria of thanks and relief for herself and sorrow for those who did not make it. Alexander is given his aria to explain the play’s message just when we think he will finally sing about his internal conflict of love for Oksana and his vow of celibacy. If only Murphy and Gervais had not curtailed refections of the characters on their fraught situations, the opera as a whole would have much more emotional impact.
The production has an excellent cast, design and direction. Natalya Gennadi, a young Ukrainian-Canadian is ideal for the role of Oksana. With a pure, strong, liquid soprano, Gennadi describes Oksana’s wide dramatic arc from youthful happiness to betrayal, despair and, most movingly, the recovery of her sense of self-worth.
Keith Klassen as Konstantin and Adam Fisher as Father Alexander make a fine pair of contrasting tenors. Klassen’s voice has darkened and grown in power over the years so that he is the perfect choice for a malign, troubled character where good struggles to break out of the bondage of the accustomed corruption of his life. As the action progresses Klassen both as actor and singer shows how Konstantin increasingly fights against his background to retrieve the decency he thought he had lost.
In contrast Fisher possesses a high, bright tenor well suited to the habitual doer of good that Father Alexander is. In the transition from the 14-minute version of Oksana to the full-length version, the focus on the priest’s internal conflict between desire and duty has been weakened, but Fisher, both through his acting and in the way he caresses his words to Oksana, helps keep his internal conflict before us. This is important because, as Murphy has designed it, both men in Oksana’s life are torn between desire and duty though the duty is of of very different kinds.
Jacqueline Woodley and Andrea Ludwig are both impressive as Oksana’s two friends Natalia and Lyuba. Woodley’s full, rounded soprano chillingly encompasses Natalia’s violent descent from joy to horror while Ludwig’s darker, harsher tones suit the highly cynical Lyuba we first meet but are expertly softened to reflect the contented woman Lyuba becomes.
The design is a masterful combination of Teresa Przybylski’s abstract set and Jason Hand’s lighting. The set consists of eleven narrow, straight-sided pillars placed within a circle, the back half rough with stones, the front half smooth. Hand is able to alter the colour of the pillars from within as well as how high this interior lighting extends. Thus, linked with his external lighting, the set can easily be transformed from a rustic interior, to a forest, to a disco, to a shelter. Director Tom Diamond has performers enter the stage from the back and from the sides of the audience so that we feel implicated in the action, particularly in the largest and most disturbing crowd scene of the sex worker auction.
Jordan de Souza sensitively guides the 15-member orchestral ensemble in a powerful reading of the score. It’s quite impressive how Gervais has blended the sound of an electric guitar so well with that of the other acoustic instruments. The work also features a 19-member chorus whose contributions are so thrilling one wishes he has found more occasion to use it.
As it is Oksana G. is a bright light in the realm of contemporary Canadian opera. While the libretto could do with revisions to increase the probability and inevitability of the actions and to allow the characters freer rein to express their inner turmoil, both the story and the music are immediately engaging and do not loosen their grip on the imagination until long after the performance is over. Gervais, Murphy and Diamond made absolutely the right decision to have the characters sing in whatever language they would in a given situation so that the work is sung in Ukrainian, Russian, Italian, English and Latin with surtitles. This lends an undeniable authenticity to the opera and reinforces the multinational nature of the crime it portrays. Anyone seeking a riveting, heart-wrenching evening of opera need look no further than Oksana G.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Natalya Gennadi as Oksana and Jacqueline Woodley as Natalia; Keith Klassen as Konstantin; chorus of trafficked women; Natalya Gennadi as Oksana and Adam Fisher as Father Alexander. ©2017 Dahlia Katz.
For tickets, visit https://tapestryopera.com.
2017-05-25
Oksana G.