Red Giant, composed by Adam Matlock; libretto by Brian Slattery; directed by Britt Olsen-Ecker, reviewed by Jen Gunnels

produced by Rhymes With Opera, featuring Elisabeth Halliday, Bonnie Lander, and Robert Maril. South Oxford Space, Brooklyn, New York, January 2014

Interplanetary travel with its discomforts and displacement are no mystery to me, for I have traveled to Brooklyn. Some of you will laugh at this statement; some of you (probably New Yorkers) will nod sagely; some just won’t understand. So when I say, “I have traveled to Brooklyn,” that means being enclosed in a little metal tube underground and under the East River for twenty-five minutes—long enough for people to give me are-you-okay looks because I have a few issues with being underground for extended periods. What would this have to do with an opera? It illustrates both my unsuitability for space exploration and my sympathy for the characters in the opera Red Giant. Three people trapped a small spacecraft, escaping a planet about to be consumed by a dying sun, have no predetermined destination, only the hope that they might be able to find a new planet where they can start again. This is coupled, however, with the despair that such a place does not exist, or even if it did, that they will never reach it. Red Giant, produced as part of Rhymes With Opera’s 2013–2014 season, reveals that the operatic can be intimate, less ornate, more subtle. The result is Sartre’s No Exit in space.

The action opens on the darkened ship and three sleeping humans. The characters have no names; they do not name one another, and the program refers to them by number. 2 (soprano Bonnie Lander) calls for light, which 3 (baritone Robert Maril) opposes: they need to save power. “For what?… Sooner or later you have to turn on the light,” 2 counters. She argues that they don’t know where they’re going—there’s no way to know that another planet lies ahead; they’re flying blind. 3 is also concerned not to wake 1 (soprano Elisabeth Halliday), and he changes the subject from turning on the light to recounting how once the sun felt good. 2 turns the lights on anyway and returns to her bed, furtively glancing at the others as she retrieves a hidden book.

The light and the hushed argument wakes 1. She seems older than the other two and presses her hand into her side as if ill or injured. 2 and 3 defer to her gentleness, and she asks 2 what she is reading. 2 sullenly tells her to mind her own business, but 1 simply asks, “Would you read it to me?”, and 2 gives in. The book recounts the history of their dying world, how the planet was once bountiful—waters and forests and fields—but that the sun began to give too much light, drying up the water and eventually driving the people underground to escape the deadly heat.

At this point, 3 interrupts 2’s narrative, blurting out that he dreamt of going out the airlock, killing himself. The other two gracefully pantomime the dream, putting on the suit, going out the airlock, and, while 1 and 2 watch, taking off the helmet as the ship raced on without him. There is an aching pause before he finishes, “I felt happy.”

The narration explains that thirty generations past, the people realized they had leave their planet or die when its sun exploded. 1 takes up the story, recounting how the underground population all came together to build small ships—a large one wasn’t possible—which could hold three or four people. Not everyone could go chose to go. The ships lifted away but had no way to communicate with each other.

A radio transmission from the planet suddenly interrupts 1. A man says it will be the last message from the planet as they wait for the end to come. The scientists have said that the sun could go at any moment. The message is a goodbye to those who have left, and until their planet is destroyed, they will broadcast the same message every day. This spurs an argument among the three: 3 wants to go back, 2 asserts that they cannot, and 1 insists that there is a way to live with this situation. The argument crescendos and comes to a sudden halt with 1’s sudden strong interjection. She recounts that once the sun expands and collapses to form a black hole there is hope. She remembers how a physicist once thought that information would not be lost in a black hole. While this is not a certainty, they choose to believe that the last day of their planet will be preserved. They turn the lights out and return to their sleep.

Suddenly, the radio repeats its earlier message, waking the three, and they slowly move through the ship to the main console while listening to the repeated broadcast. The message falls silent, and the three cry out that they want and need to see the sun again. The opera ends in a final tableau of the crew joining hands around the console and looking up as if to conjure another sun.

The opera plays with contrasts of light/dark and hope/despair. Both extremes have merits and both have limits—ultimately, we choose how to face adversity. The characters long for what they once had in abundance, but they also know that they may never find it. Much of the dynamic between the characters reminded me of No Exit—three characters of extremely differing personalities and beliefs playing off of and occasionally tormenting one another in a place from which they cannot escape. Maril’s strong baritone carried conviction that 3 was doing the right thing because it was the only thing to do, played against the animosity of 2. Lander’s brash, belligerent soprano carried the frustration of a woman who was frustrated with both the situation and herself for having chosen to do anything to survive—even something hopeless. The gentleness of 1, the fragility that was beautifully expressed by Halliday’s delicate soprano, serves as a pivot for the other two, showing them that they can choose to continue even without the knowledge or guarantee of a destination.

Matlock’s composition, while firmly rooted in more traditional musical forms, still used elements some might consider modern to underscore and serve the emotional needs of the libretto. Of this work he says in his program notes,

The clearest thing in my head the entire time was the sense of space, the claustrophobia of the isolated setting of a spacecraft combined with the feeling of insignificance against a galactic backdrop: “all the space in the universe around us.”

This was accomplished through combinations of instrument effects and sparse but well-used tritone chords to underscore emotional sections. At the beginning of the opera, there is a drone evoking the ship’s engine, the sound so welded together that I would be hard pressed to say whether it was the bass or the timpani or both. The drone was felt as much as heard, so subtle I didn’t notice it at first. Underscoring moments of reminiscing about their planet, the strings carried a lighter, more pastoral tone which mutated into the sweeping and disconcerting minors of the sun as it began to die.

I was curious as to why Matlock chose more traditional musical forms rather than relying on more experimental, atonal, and dissonant themes as modern opera often does, particularly in denoting sf via music. Matlock’s priority was finding rhythms that followed the text. About his particular approaches to the composition, he said:

The other thought was to imagine what kind of music a society in this position would produce. It obviously wouldn’t be huge orchestra music—it might be reaching for a huge sound but would have some sparseness here and there. And I’d also think that any society that had been living under the threat of extinction for centuries would have a music that would incorporate some dissonance as part of the character. In my music, the modern-sounding stuff, both in terms of the [Philip] Glass–like sound and the dissonant post-war sound, is balanced out in some degree by the folk and traditional stuff that I listen to. There are some strange parallels between music of these eras, and Red Giant is not the only piece in which I’ve explored this. I am also a songwriter and write music that is partially improvised and/or works with electronics, so there is a fair amount of cross-pollination between each of these projects. (email 1/22/14)

My favorite moment, which illustrates how music and libretto work together to create an emotional scene, is the three-way argument just after the first radio transmission. 3 wants to go back to face the end, 2 points out the impossibility and futility of doing so, and 1 insists that there is a way to live with the situation and move forward. The climax of the argument is an unnerving tritone. It’s dissonant to a profound degree, and I felt the discord on a visceral level. Listening to it just flat-out makes you uncomfortable—like witnessing a family argument at a friend’s house. This particular musical chord is exceedingly difficult and showcased the virtuosity of all three singers to hold the chord for as long as they did.

The minimal production design, a combination of both the set and the lighting, carried forward the sense of claustrophobic nerves rubbed raw that Matlock pointed to as his focus. Set designer Dustin Morris turned the audience into a container. The seats were packed in (given the intimate space, this made sense), and I along with others pretty much sat atop the footlights. Our bodies served as a living bulkhead for the tiny compartment of the spacecraft. A rectangular stage, roughly eight feet by twenty, guaranteed the singers would be toe to toe. A black drape at the extreme end of the thin thrust area concealed the orchestra. Immediately in front of that sat a battered beach lounger, a short, plain, black bench was placed half-way down stage left on the long axis of the thrust, and a mat lay on the ground opposite at stage right. Taking up the tip of the thrust was a simple square box, about four feet by two-and-a-half feet, with two joysticks and a simple control panel.

Underscoring the set, David Crandall used a few lighting effects to highlight and emphasize the sense of containment. Along each side of the thrust, he placed LED strip lights to indicate the ship’s interior running lights, which changed when the “lights” came on in the ship. Crandall also employed some simple yet artistically sophisticated projection work by focusing images on the floor of the set. Projecting a grid pattern for the ship’s deck served to make an opening statement on the concrete space of the action. The projections changed over the course of the opera depending on the action or the material being spoken of, the most dramatic of which was a rotating iris of orange and red which grew larger and larger, a sun growing larger as it dies while 1 described going underground and building the ships. As she evoked the possible physics of a black hole, the floor scrolled through dense equations.

The costumes? Well, those needed a bit of work, but they got by with ragged burlap. I will note here that Rhymes With Opera is one of those extremely rare companies that chooses to work with a single piece over a period of years, experimenting and refining the performance. Each iteration has more detail, and the extended time to work grants the various artists a chance to develop the richness of the subject and its representation. To put this in perspective, a typical play would usually be given four weeks to design and rehearse for performances. Grand opera, which often involves the singers’ knowledge of a given repertoire, has the luxury of pieces that have been performed many times over centuries. The singers and musicians already know the material and so can focus on the nuances the director, conductor, and designers will bring. I have no doubt that Red Giant will continue to evolve and grow in sophistication—which would include the costumes.

Opera and sf are hardly strangers. Tod Machover, whose opera Death and the Powers (2010) (NYRSF 277), was merely one in a long line of sfnal works including VALIS (1987) and The Brain Opera (1996). And of course I cannot leave out the Klingon opera, U (2010). As a background, Anne McCaffrey used opera (and once worked in opera as well) to great effect in a number of her books, notably in the Crystal Singer series. C. J. Cherryh writes detailed sf cultures, and in her Foreigner series, the Atevi have machimi, plays combining Japanese Kabuki with a sort of operatic grandeur.

More directly related to Red Giant is the opera Aniara (1959), based on a poem of the same name by Nobel Laureate Harry Martinson. The libretto is similar to that of Red Giant: a Mars-bound ship of colonists escapes a dying Earth only to accidentally leave the solar system entirely, condemning them to an endless voyage deeper into space. The poem Aniara was referenced in Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep and may have been an influence on Poul Anderson’s novel Tau Zero.

Science fiction author Brian Slattery, author of Spaceman Blues: A Love Song (2007), Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America (2008), and Lost Everything (2012), should give great consideration to writing more libretti. Red Giant was extremely engaging, and his initial foray into this medium shows a great deal of promise. He resorted to a bit of “infodumping,” which is often a problem when authors switch to a “show me, don’t tell me” medium. However, he cleverly uses the stories the characters tell one another as a vehicle for the necessary backstory—given that we don’t really know how long they’ve been in the ship, they might have been telling these stories over and over to one another. I wouldn’t mind seeing more of Slattery’s playwriting, and according to Matlock, he and Slattery may collaborate on projects in the future.

Perhaps the most arresting question in the opera, for me anyway, was the radio transmission and 1’s subsequent tale of the physicist who said that the Event Horizon could, perhaps, preserve their world on that last day. I recognized the reference to the Information Loss Paradox which was the foundation of the Thorne-Hawking-Preskill bet made in 1997. In essence, the paradox questions whether information in a black hole is completely lost or whether some (or all) of that information leaks out during the evaporation of the black hole. In 2004, Hawking conceded that information might be preserved, but Thorne did not. Even after Hawking’s 2008 argument resolving the paradox, his finding remains contentious. In Red Giant, the transmission simply states that the scientists predict the end at any moment; the scientists had been saying this for days. The voice further states that should the end not come, he would give the same message the following day.

What was the second transmission?

It could be that the end has not come to the planet, and they patiently await their deaths as the sun expands and then collapses into a black hole. Or the transmission could be a ghost, an echo, of that last day preserved and ceaselessly repeating the message from the amber-like preservation of the event horizon. The characters’ choices and actions seem to indicate that they believe in the latter. Their journey to find another sun may or may not be successful, but they chose to make the effort to find it.

Like going to Brooklyn.

Jen Gunnels lives like a virtual particle, continually appearing and disappearing into the event horizon of sf theater.

Soprano Bonnie Lander as 2. Photograph by Anthony Trujillo.

1 (Elisabeth Halliday) & 2 (Bonnie Lander) remembering their home planet. Photograph by Anthony Trujillo.

3 (Robert Maril) tells 1 and 2 his dream of leaving the airlock. Photograph by Anthony Trujillo.