Exposing the secret self in a Postcard from Morocco
This March, the Binghamton University Music Department will be joining forces with the university’s Theatre Department to step outside the realm of the conventional and present Postcard from Morocco, Dominick Argento’s successful 1971 one-act opera in a fully-staged production.
Argento, an acclaimed composer and laureate of the American Choral Directors Association’s Brock Commission award for choral composition, scored the opera to a libretto by John Donahue which was based on A Child’s Garden of Verses, a collection of somber-themed children’s poetry by Robert Louis Stevenson, the Scottish author best known for his widely read novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
First performed by the Center Opera Company (now the Minnesota Opera), Postcard from Morocco proceeds from a relatable scenario, but tells a story that is more symbolic in its significance than it is narrative. A group of strangers are waiting together for a train that is late. Each is carrying a common object, be it a hand mirror, a cake box, or an old luggage. Rather than being named, they are known only by the object that they carry. And, as the production’s music director Willy Waters explains it to Carousel, “Each of their scenes deals with what they have in that box or how they relate to whatever it is, and their past relationships with whomever and whatever is in it. But they are very, very, very protective of what is in there. I tell my students that I heard once that everybody has three lives. You have a public life, a private life, and a secret life. So this deals with the secret part of that, and them trying to protect that secret, because this is the thing that means the most to them. Many of the characters feel that their whole world is uprooted and destroyed if that secret is revealed.”
Waters, who has over 30 years of opera experience including working as the general director of the Connecticut Opera and Florida Grand Opera, chose this piece carefully. And foremost in his mind is the need to stretch the students who will be performing the piece and aid them in growing their skills. “It gives all of these performers individual opportunities to shine and to develop,” he says. “One of the things I’m trying to do here—because we have some very good singers here—is to get them to the point at which they are developing characters, and they are thinking not only about the musical aspects but about the psychological and acting aspects of the opera. And this piece is rather abstract musically. It requires a lot of imagination and a lot of thought which young singers don’t often get.”
Appropriately for a piece that is sung in its expected audience’s main language of English and that is so theatrically experimental, Postcard from Morocco begins a collaboration between the music and theatre departments of the university. And for that purpose, Tommy Iafrate—the director of the musical theatre program within the theatre department—will act as stage director, and staff from the theatre department will be on hand designing and building scenery and costumes.
The piece presents interesting challenges for Iafrate in this role. “Not only is this a different experience for me because it’s an opera and not a musical,” he says, “but also because this piece is so contemporary and expressionistic and surreal, and obviously a lot of golden-age musical theatre is a little bit more straightforward! So it’s a really exciting opportunity for me to start playing with a form or a style that I don’t normally get a chance to work with.”
As Iafrate explains, it’s not just the style of narrative that breaks with tradition; the story itself plays with expectations of consecutive time. “It jumps all over through time and different time periods. The opera does not necessarily take place chronologically. There isn’t a direct cause-and-effect relationship where one scene follows the previous scene. But over the course of this hour-and-a-half piece, we do get to see the way characters put up walls and keep each other at bay in order to hide our own secrets and hide our own pain, or whatever figurative baggage we carry around with us on a daily basis.”
But for all involved, the real attraction of the opera is, of course, the music. And in that area, it presents a score that is both innovative and expressive. According to Gina Moscato, a soprano second-year master’s student in voice who will be playing the role of the Lady with a Cake Box, the score is both challenging and rewarding: “I think it’s more that the music is very different from what people think of as opera. We have sections where we’re all singing together but it doesn’t create quite a tonal chord that normal music listeners are used to listening to. But it really does have quite a charm to it. Once you get used to it you hear these arias and trios and you find the gem within that piece. And it really grows on you.”
And for Waters, such a complex and avant-garde score requires careful attention and rehearsal. “My approach is always from the music,” he reveals. “A lot of it is rather freeform. It’s multi-metric. The meter changes every other measure in lots of places and it goes with the flow of the text. So a lot of times I tell the students to just read the text and get the flow of the text in your mouth before you go to the music. Then begin to add the music to it, and that becomes a very difficult process because the music is very complicated. But in the end, once you have got it learned, you find that the music does go with the natural flow of the words. You’ll see in this piece that a lot of the music is rather abstract, but very angular. Sometimes you have to look hard, but there is a lot of melody in this piece.”
The cast also includes Carina Kahane, Lianne Aharony, Jordan Bowman, Deanna Morgan, Kelly Lynn, Seokho Park, Cole Tornberg, Erik Tofte, and Evan Julius Nelson.
