ETHAN FROME: N EVENING OF OPERA AT ELIOT HOUSE

ETHAN EROME

Directed by Brett Egan '99

Eliot House Dining Hall

November 20 and 21 at 8:30 p.m.

Edith Wharton's well known novella, Ethan Frome--a tale of love, forbidden passion and its tragic consequences--lends itself particularly well to a genre whose main intention is to represent and express human feelings on a grander scale. And that genre is none other than opera. Opera vows to unite music and poetry so as to engage the audience in feeling as much empathy, compassion and even terror as possible.

Everything must contribute to the success of this goal, and of course the scenery and costumes play a large part in this undertaking. Although an opera can be enjoyed on cassette or radio, to see it is to truly believe it; there is little doubt that as a spectacle seen on stage, opera is a synthesis of the arts. No wonder an opera is a complex machine involving performances of singing actors, stage managers, costume designers, make-up artists, a full orchestra and behind it all, the authors of a text written or re-written as lyrics. Operatic work is teamwork par excellence--for the stage to become alive with an uncanny reality, all these different parts must work smoothly. The making of an opera, in a sense, is a technical democracy.

Opera, whose birth coincided with the advent of enlightened ideas in the late 17th and 18th centuries, is a relatively young genre. Opera is as "modern," as epic is "ancient." So it comes as no surprise that the decision to transform Ethan Frome from literary text into opera would be made by an innovating Harvard alumni. Written by Douglas Allanbrook '48, the libretto is also the work of fellow Harvard graduate (John Hunt '48) while the production itself is headed musically by Douglas Allenbrook's son, John Allanbrook '99.

The performance takes place in the Eliot House dining hall, transformed for this occasion into an arena where stage and audience strangely collide. At first, this non-traditional set-up might seem uncomfortable; the orchestra was extremely close, almost at arms-length from the public. But in fact, this proximity--a frequent device of theater and plays--creates an intimate interaction between the audience and the performers, rare in opera these days. What the work loses in majesty, it gains in intimacy and closeness.

Lee Poulis '02, in the lead role of Ethan, offers a star turn as the stodgy, emotionally numb farmer, trying to break free from his oppressive marriage to Zeena. Poulis' deep, rich voice, along with his uncanny portrayal of Ethan's isolation and frustration, is by far the best performance in the opera.

Emily Browder, a faculty member at the New School of Music in Cambridge, convincingly plays the charming Mattie Silver, Ethan's love. Her soprano voice conveys the lightness and beauty of her character, literally breathing fresh air into the opera. Emily perfectly captures the spirit of the naive Mattie who--all alone in the world and pursued by men--still managers to keep her innocence. The petite, red-haired Browder shines in the role, a natural foil to Anita Constanzo's embittered Zeena. Although at first Constanzo's performance seems too rough in her expression of anger, the audience soon realizes that Constanzo embodies Zeena--hunched over and greasy-haired in a raggedy house dress (her ungrammatical English completes the picture.) Actors Craig Hanson and Jotham Powell, as Denis Eady and Morgan Moody, round out the fine cast led by the expertly cold and dispassionate Poulis.

Ethan Frome's only flaw is its set and production design. Although it is certainly cozy to be seated near the orchestra and to see all of the musicians, it eventually becomes distracting; the orchestra even drowns out the singing at some points. The stage itself is sparsely decorated: though not out of sync with the plain New England farmhouse of Wharton's novella, it still appears lacking. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that the stage is so small that the actors often have nowhere to go.

Although the lighting is minimal, it is used to good effect, highly symbolic of the events unfolding on stage. Whenever Ethan appears, the blue light shines, emitting an atmosphere of desperation; whenever Mattie appears, a bright yellow light is used, thus emphasizing how she literally brightens up the stage.

Yet the confusing set-up unfortunately detracts from the production. The actors, for instance, walk onto the stage through the audience, often distorting reality. It is difficult to see Mattie, in the epilogue, walk through the audience and climb right onto the stage, only to pretend to be paralyzed from a sledding accident. Although we all fundamentally realize that what happens on the stage is not reality, the opera Ethan Frome could use some fine tuning--from the unpolished scene changes to the deficient set to the fact that one might have a better view of the orchestra than the stage.

Indeed, the slowness and heaviness that characterized the opera Ethan Frome precisely mirrors the tone of the novella. Allanbrook certainly does not change the focus of the novella and his opera portrays the slowness with which life progresses for the Fromes--particularly for Ethan, whose long-defunct love of Zeena causes his perpetual agony. Although the opera's most dramatic scenes--the breaking of Zeena's prize pickle plate and the infamous sledding scene in which Mattie and Ethan encounter their fateful punishment--are a little played down, this seems appropriate when viewed from Wharton's original perspective. In their boring, puritanical New England lives, even their dramas were still anguishingly slow and more silently painful than outwardly loud or angry.

By downplaying these small moments of mayhem,Ethan Frome pays homage to Wharton, making them all the more powerful. Ethan Frome is not sturm und drang, but rather a tale of mute desperation. Allanbrook Sr. and Hunt should be commended for keeping their opera true to a difficult, complex novella.