Review: Butterfly takes wing. Timothy Nelson has rescued Puccini’s most famous opera

Every age gets to reassess the value of a work of art relative to its present times, and not just aesthetically but politically. Never more so than today. Sometimes in our society’s self-congratulating political correctness this comes on with a vengeance; a work gets excoriated, bashed in, and thrown on the artistic ash heap. But sometimes, fast forward, someone comes by and dusts it off, reexamines the work and finds new meaning and a way to salvage a work’s reputation.  Timothy Nelson, Artistic Director of the IN Series has done just that with Giacomo Puccini’s canonical opera Madame Butterfly.

Despite 19^th-century romantic composer Puccini writing arguably some of the most beautiful music in all of opera and creating a designer’s dream world of a setting, many modern audience members have cringed, calling out the cultural appropriation of the world of the geisha, the unabashed exoticism, gender stereotypes and racial overtones.

Then along comes Nelson, who already showed last season  (his first at the helm of In Series) that he is fearless and endlessly inventive in re-imagining classics. With Puccini, he has torn through the thorns and brambles that have grown up around the work like a fairy-tale prince, hacking through the magically-sealed forest, to rescue the princess.  Indeed, he has rescued his own Butterfly and let her take wing.

Reflecting on the production, I was reminded of the strange resurrection of the twentieth-century literary giant whom many people referred to simply as “Papa Hemingway.” My father touted him, as did many last middle-century, as the “greatest,” devoting three shelves of his library to various editions of the man’s oeuvre. (“You can never have too much Hemingway.”) Later, Hemingway was trashed for all that had made him famous: his machismo reputation as hunter, rebel soldier, lover of bullfights, and womanizer. Recently, he has been reinstated for everything apparently he so carefully hid: cross-dressing, gender-bending sex, and tortured vulnerability and presented as a modern-day hero.

Many directors of the Puccini opera struggle to create a flesh-and-blood woman who might have chosen a different path than the tragic end that unfolds. In this reduction of the story, Nelson focuses on the psychological fragility of the character. There is no equivocation, no other possible outcome, and the other characters act more like a chorus in a classic Greek tragedy, bearing witness to Butterfly’s inexorable descent to madness and the final darkness.

Nelson has also created a premise that makes both the excising and his interpretation plausible. Most (or perhaps all) of the story takes place in a mental asylum. One is not sure, and it raises the question whether there ever was a love, a 999-year lease arrangement with a man called Pinkerton. Judging by the odd object she clutches to her and cradles, there certainly was not a child. Or was there?

Set Designer Jonathan Dahm Robertson has built a spare, symbolic and functional set for Butterfly’s world. Stark white walls and floor create a neutral box with six giant egg-shaped plaster-of-Paris jars arranged in a circle, each in its own pool of light. It feels on first viewing to be an artist’s installation. Later it seems a sterile cell where the mentally unstable might be kept isolated in a suicide watch. More than anything, it suggests an interior world so devoid of real life that it could account for a fragile psyche’s unraveling.

Throughout the show, the set provides multiple surfaces for projections – waves, snow flakes, petals and stars as well as opportunities for shadow play, all created by Lighting Designer Marianne Meadows.

Butterfly closes September 22, 2019. Details and tickets

Costumes (by Donna Breslin) are also neutral and suggest a western contemporaneity, certainly not “oriental.” The performers work barefoot. The touch of perfection is a diaphanous slightly metallic-threaded cover-all for Butterfly that allows her to raise and close her wings and that floats through the air following her every move and gesture.

At the center of the production is Butterfly. Nelson has wisely worked with two casts, one singing in English and one in Italian, because even as a chamber opera, the singer who must deliver Butterfly is onstage and almost non-stop singing for seventy minutes.

Amanda Palmeiro is exquisite in the role. How lovely that in the small, formerly Source theatre space on 14^th Street neither she nor the other singers need to push.  It makes the passages she delivers pianissimo all the more emotionally fragile and heart-wrenching.  How lucky we are to be so close to the stage that we can see and appreciate every psychological shift. Her focus is razor sharp through her character’s every twist and turn, attesting to the emotional depth of the artist’s instrument. That she can deliver the English diction smoothly, without a trace of awkwardness, when most operatic singers learn the work in the original Italian, is also commendable.

Elizabeth Mondragon performs with both casts as Suzuki. It’s mostly through her eyes we see her friend and mistress fall apart, and therefore it is left to her to witness helplessly with a lot of hand-wringing and wiping away tears.  One of the most touching scenes in the whole production, and most moving musically, is when the women get to sing “The Flower Duet.” Here Mondragon makes it clear that she is trying to give the other woman some emotional relief (and perhaps herself too.) She enters into the game, knowing it’s a lie.  As they grab and throw petals into the air, they engage in some horse play, as if they are two children out in the first day of snow and pelting each other. They give us all a moment of emotional respite.

Brian Arreola, singing as Pinkerton, and Erik Grendahl, singing as Sharpless, are given less scope due to the concept for this production, and dramatically they therefore remain more enigmatic.  But Arreola brings what he can to the role both in his singing and the drama, especially arresting in the scene where he grabs his lover’s arms and holds them straight out from her body.  Butterfly struggles, and we watch a man overcome by passion seize her to possess her sexually but also a human who has to hold power over a wild creature.  As she struggles to break free from captivity, his hold grows more forceful and he more cruel.

Similarly Grendahl gives us a marvelous turn when he switches into the psychiatrist in the hospital, genuinely sympathetic on one hand in his helplessness that he can’t give Butterfly something to relieve her from her distress. But then when she leaps at him, mistaking him for her ally to rally her phantom lover, he struggles with this unstrung woman burying herself in his chest, pushing her away and unable to disguise his disgust at her outburst.

The musical arrangement is marvelous both in concept and piano playing by Jessica Krash.  I don’t generally like “reduced” scores, and I’m usually hyper-aware that the lack of financial resources have guided the decision about numbers and compromised power.  But this was so keenly re-invented. The piano (down stage right) is incorporated into the action: first by being exposed and “prepared,”  allowing the characters to punctuate their sung remarks or emotional moments by banging their hands down on the open strings. Krash herself brings many new colors into the score and beautifully extends the emotional experience of the opera when the piano becoming almost a character itself, while she throughout supports the singers. And they give back as an instrumental chorus, for instance, when they “hum” into the resonant space of the piano’s body. Suddenly we have a “human”  orchestral ensemble.

There are very few misses in the evening.  Suzuki exits upstage disappearing into what, on the evening I was there, should have been black, but instead an unfortunate light was left on and it breaks our suspension of disbelief by the singer opening a door to an-all-too-lit dressing room.  Butterfly pulling down the papery wall panels becomes self-conscious staging with our wondering if each one is going to come down properly.  Lighting designer Marianne Meadows’ use of shadows and back lighting becomes at times less than magical in this cramped and exposed space, as when we watch Butterfly walk offstage into a stumpy lighting instrument. It seems more like a piece of Peter Sellars’ theatrical chicanery – the light glaring into the audience’s eyes –  and doesn’t support the image of the final flight of a winged insect.

If you are an opera aficionado and love Madame Butterfly, get thee to this intimate, exploration of the jewel-like facets of her inner character.   Where else can you join in the singing of the beloved “Humming Chorus?!” (And if your music-theatre tastes runs more to Broadway musicals, no worries, you can pretend to be Alfie Boe and deliver mostly the same tune, “Bring Him Home,” from Les Miserables.)

There are two casts and two directors’ salons (one on race and one on gender) if you care to participate. You can also just enjoy the work as a strong piece of theatre.

In jettisoning the exoticism, Nelson nonetheless demonstrates well Puccini’s respect for Japanese music’s melodic intervals – and Krash delivers, even giving us here and there the plucked sound of the koto re-imagined on piano strings. More importantly, they have fully restored the central heartbreak of Puccini’s work: a woman who can’t give up waiting for (even if imagined) the great love of her life to return.  As singer-actor Palmeiro sweeps everyone up in her agony, she shows us in this deconstructed portrait how a woman can become psychologically unmoored.

Butterfly. Music by Giacomo Puccini. Stage Director and Concept Timothy Nelson. Music Director and Pianist Jessica Krash. Set Design by Jonathan Dahm Robertson. Lighting Design by Marianne Meadows. Costume Design by Donna Breslin. With Brian Arreola, Erik Grendahl, Elizabeth Mondragon, and Amanda Palmeiro. Produced by In Series. Reviewed by Susan Galbraith.