Ask any opera lover the first thing that comes to mind when they think of Lucia di Lammermoor, and the answer is sure to be a wide-eyed soprano in a blood-soaked wedding dress, doing her best to look deranged as she chews the scenery in the repertory’s most famous mad scene. This season at the Met, however, Lucia will look a little different, as Australian director Simon Stone—renowned for his audacious re-imaginings of classic works—makes his company debut with a new staging that aims to cut through the clichés and find contemporary relevance in Donizetti’s classic tragedy.
In Stone’s production, the familiar story of a young woman
manipulated by her abusive brother into marriage, madness, and murder is moved
from 18th-century Scotland to a struggling present-day locale somewhere in
America’s Rust Belt. The director describes the setting as “the wasteland of
free-market capitalism”—a kind of Anytown, U.S.A., populated by characters
grasping for an American Dream that has passed them by.
Extraordinary soprano Nadine Sierra stars as an opioid-addicted
Lucia who yearns for a better life, opposite tenor phenomenon Javier Camarena
as her secret lover Edgardo—both making major Met role debuts. Riccardo Frizza
takes the podium for the April 23 premiere, which also features baritone Artur
Ruciński as Lucia’s brother Enrico, who forces her to marry for money, with
disastrous consequences. Speaking with the Met’s Matt Dobkin, Stone explained
why he thinks audiences will be “exhilarated by how close their own experience,
or that of their fellow Americans, can be to grand opera.”
Simon Stone
What attracts you to Lucia?
First, the music is extraordinary and
incredibly moving. But also, I think the opera gives us a chance to tell a
contemporary American story. One unattractive thing about
19th-century Italian opera is that it’s often about male honor and dignity and
that the women in the stories become victims of that male pride. But we’re
living in a time today when the patriarchy is starting to be called into
question, especially in terms of the mechanisms that it uses to control
women—both subtly, in terms of coercive control, and very explicitly, in terms
of laws that control women’s rights and women’s bodies. So I thought that Lucia would
be a great opportunity to participate in that conversation and confront the
simultaneous absurdity and danger of the idea that a man’s pride is more
important than a woman’s life.
Once you had decided to reframe the story in
present-day America, how did you land on setting it in the Rust Belt?
In Sir Walter Scott’s novel The Bride
of Lammermoor, and in Salvadore Cammarano’s libretto, there’s a clear
setting: the Scottish Highlands, in an era when the local aristocracy was
running out of money and coming to a point of desperation and insignificance in
relationship to the rest of Britain. That sense of encroaching poverty
immediately led me to look at the areas in contemporary America with heavy job
loss and loss of traditional sources of work—where industries have died. In
these areas, there are many people who struggle with the notion of protecting
their families’ tradition, protecting the history of who they are. Especially
men, growing up expecting that they were going to take over the family job and
that their life was going to essentially be very similar to the lives of their
grandparents: two cars, a house, comfort—the basic dream of the average middle
class or upper working-class guy in America. It’s always in these moments,
where men feel that they and their sources of income are threatened, that
misogyny and patriarchal abuses resurge.
What is it that interests you in exploring
these conditions?
I’m interested in the way the death of the
capitalist dream for certain people intersects with the rise of intolerant and
abusive attitudes. Because of course you don’t subscribe to a dream once you feel like
it’s lied to you. You immediately think there’s a conspiracy behind that. If
you’re a middle-aged white guy in the Rust Belt, you grew up in a world that
promised you way, way more, and those promises are coming up hugely short. For
that person, anyone else’s feelings of betrayal or abuse can’t compete with his
own sense of loss from the position he lived in earlier to where he’s landed.
So you have capitalist systems, which only care about profit, abusing workers,
who in turn become perpetrators of abuse against other members of society,
especially women. It’s a sad, vicious cycle.
How have you, along with set designer Lizzie Clachan and costume
designer Alice Babidge, portrayed this decay of the American dream on stage?
The aesthetic is
essentially boarded-up houses that used to be the pride of a street, the
supermarket that has hardly any customers, the pawn shop where people go to
sell their grandparents’ belongings. It’s the pharmacy where you pick up your
methadone or OxyContin, the swings in the park where you go to get high, and
the drive-in cinema. And it’s the motel where you meet your boyfriend for a
tryst because your brother made a blood oath that he’ll never let you see that
guy ever again because of an old family feud. The costumes are an extension of
that world—tracksuits and the stuff you wear to be comfortable, but also what
you wear when you’ve decided to go out at 11PM to meet your secret lover, and
you want to look fantastic. And, of course, there’s going to be a wedding dress
in Act III. That’s unavoidable.
How do the characters of the opera fit into this troubled modern
culture?
Lucia is an outsider
who moves through that world and feels no connection to it, feels completely
disgusted by its principles and its priorities—the classic story of someone who
wants to get out. And we follow her subjective journey, sometimes using video
by projection designer Luke Halls, to be with her even when she’s not on stage.
Also, in the second act, you see her on Facebook talking to Edgardo, who’s
joined the military and gone overseas because he can’t find any other work. He
wants to marry Lucia, and for them to get out together, so he makes the
sacrifice to earn some money. You see the backstory of how they’ve been writing
to each other, and how they’re in love, at the same time that Lucia’s brother
Enrico is organizing her arranged marriage downstairs.
One topic that figures prominently in your
staging is drug use—specifically opioid abuse. How did you decide
to make Lucia addicted to OxyContin? Is it to help with the plausibility of the
mad scene?
Well, I didn’t want her to go mad just because she had to marry the wrong
person. There is a series of steps at which a person has to be neglected by
society before she is committed to an asylum. So essentially, I wanted to
portray a more complex journey than just that she was made to choose between
one of two men, and being with the wrong one turned her into a psychopathic
killer. The drug addiction does help with the mad scene, but more importantly,
I want some people to think: “Of course you ended up killing that guy. You’ve
been subtly, casually abused on a daily basis by the men in your life.”
So you see Lucia’s story as an entirely believable scenario?
Yes, this is
unfortunately a typical, representative story of people who suffer years of
coercive control—of not being allowed to leave the house, of being told exactly
when and where they can go to sleep, when and where they can eat. One day, that
person wakes up and kills their partner or their husband. Women in those
situations don’t have access to the kind of help they need, and we don’t
recognize how coercive control can really be the equivalent of incredibly
violent control.
It sounds like you’re determined that audiences really feel the
forces acting on Lucia’s mind.
The sense of
dependency linking Lucia to the men in her life is for me really important. In
a contemporary world, we can’t simply tell a story about a woman who is being
told what to do by her family. In order to create the level of empathy we need
for a woman forced into a marriage, who kills her new husband on their wedding
night, we have to see the pathology of the moments leading up to that. We need
to see her as someone already trying to escape, trying to not feel, trying to
be elsewhere—but also realizing that she relies on her brother for the little
money their family still has. He controls it, so he controls her. So we meet
her broken, and we watch the men succeed in finishing her. Thank God she takes
one of them down on the way.
Are you able to find some beauty amid the darkness of this opera?
Absolutely. We can’t
just put grime all over, without letting moments of great romance come out. The
setting is grim, but the characters aren’t ready to let go of the possibility
of finding happiness, and I think that creates an incredibly romantic
underpinning of a fading dream. To me, that’s the way Donizetti’s score sounds,
as well. He creates a sense of nostalgia from the get-go—the music of fading
dreams. What’s so beautiful about these great Italian tragic operas is that
they feel like they’re already over when they start, and what you see is the
struggle to revitalize and to rejuvenate something that is slipping away, about
to be lost forever.
Interview by Matt Dobkin
Edited by Jay Goodwin
https://www.metopera.org/discover/articles/fading-dreams/
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