by Paul Elie
from Georgetown University

Prototype Festival: Opera on a Mythic Plane

The Southern Gothic is alive and well and living in the opera houses of New York – or, more precisely, in the city’s multipurpose performance spaces.

This year’s Prototype Festival of “visionary theater and opera” featured two works rooted in the Southern Gothic: The Scarlet Ibis, a chamber opera adaptation of a 1960 short story about two brothers in the early modern South, and Winter’s Child, an original oratorio about a mother who has lost three daughters and is trying desperately to hold onto a fourth.

I was invited to lead a talkback about the two productions and the Southern Gothic at St. Paul’s Chapel, and there was plenty to talk about.  What is the Southern Gothic?  Let’s see.  It’s work set in a place physically ruined and religiously overshadowed, where mystery and manners are in abundant supply; or – as Winter’s Child composer Ellen Reid’s program notes suggested – it’s a compote of family and death and love and shouts and curses and Jesus.

Scarlet Ibis librettist David Cote disavowed any attempt to write Southern Gothic, but he had a sure answer to what effect the southern setting  – North Carolina circa 1912-1918 – had on the work.   “It meant that the story could unfold directly on a mythic plane instead of my having to push it there from a starting point of realism,” he said.

The chamber opera’s use of puppetry had a similar effect.  Spending time with a younger brother (called “Doodle”) who has a disability in the legs, the character called Brother resolves to teach him to walk – and compares him to Frankenstein and Lazarus in a single breath.  Well, seeing the puppet who is Doodle gradually rise and walk, singing all the while, really was akin to seeing the raising of Lazarus.  It was that startling.  Hawthorne – or Flannery O'Connor – couldn’t have done it better.