Prototype is a yearly New York City festival known for putting contemporary stories on stage that mix the language of opera with modern technology. It’s exhilarating. Opera is an art of parts: costume, voice, chorus, stage, light, orchestra, dance… and something that prototype does so well is knitting the parts into a cohesive and very intimate whole.
Adoration, the first of the 2024 season accomplishes this melding admirably in a story that explores the identity and trauma of a Lebanese/American family. It is based on a movie of the same title and parsed out to the audience as a mystery, but before the parts can coalesce, we sit.
Whispers struggle against a static wall of sound that permeates the theater, and still, we sit.
The show begins fifteen minutes late and while I don’t think it was the intention (maybe something with lighting) the ongoing static engages a physical tension within me building up a palpable anticipation that only a high soprano will release.
Along with the audible static, video static also projects onto an angled wall on stage in an example of knitting together disparate parts. It makes a nice transition from the music to the physical set. Both just outside reach of recognition like a memory trying to come forward.
If loss and trauma have a sound the instrumentals reaching out of the static are catching that vibe.
A young man enters in a hoodie reminding me of the students I teach, so not surprising I find him to be a sympathetic character. Like many of them his interactions with others largely play out on social media.
The tenor Omar Najmi hits the right tremulously yet rich tones all night with his character.
He is tasked with a writing an assignment for his teacher, a mysterious character who also for some reason infiltrates his home life. Her motives seem unclear, but her voice and demeanor are caring. With her encouragement he tells the story of his father and mother – and this is where the mystery gets pretty heavy.
He shares with the world thru his laptop that his father sent his pregnant mother onto a commercial flight with a bomb hidden in her luggage.
They are both dead.
This plot line immediately strikes a nerve, especially here in New York City. When the character’s story goes viral the complexities of identity and bias take on a fresh immediacy as zoom chats of opinionated teenagers in both support and anger are projected onto the wall with the vehement emotional certitude of the young.
The medium predictably escalates the plot and it hits a second nerve within me. In the school I teach conflicts are also amplified through the medium of social media.
If i’m honest I’m a little confused about what’s going on at the beginning of the show.
The music resonates loss, but something is off with the protagonists story. There is a mystery here and the painful truths of these characters remain mysterious.
This contemporary opera is a multifaceted multi-sensory fragmentation of narrative. Perspectives prism as the characters on stage watch themselves through social media projections cast upon a set that seamlessly shifts between interior and exterior, past and present. I am fully engaged trying to fit the parts together into a satisfying resolution.
My ear is less versed in the digital sounds of the show compared to more traditional orchestration, but they do effectively rise and fall with the characters emotional journey. Beneath it however I notice the pizzicato of the string section playing off stage. I find this convergence of classical and contemporary thrilling and lean my ear forward.
The strings are a big part of the character’s journey and not just as an expressive tool. The violin becomes a potent symbol throughout the opera and when its full significance in the life of the character is revealed the parts and the whole come together for a poignant closure.
I am always carried away by how much performers and production teams give to small shows like this that don’t have long runs, true passion projects. It’s a beautiful collaborative thing. With this sincerity the singers like the orchestration do much to bring me into the emotional space of the story.
I was excited to see Karim play the father in this production, having seen him in his own recent and excellent production of Unholy Wars in Philadelphia recently. He has a commanding and trusting presence on stage. A joyful moment with his character (wink) becomes a devastating haunt at the end.
Miriam Khalil as Sabine has a very complicated slow reveal. She navigates her beautiful clean voice with amplification like a debate between the natural and artificial, truth and the guise. When her revelations come to light, the wall of static that permeates most of the production totally quiets. The contrast stills my heart and my ear leans even more forward.
A large part of the tension in the show stems from the Christian/Islam dynamic between these two cultures coming to terms with their biases and trying to find common ground.
This tribalism between belief systems is both personal and perplexing to me. Arguments about supernatural beings working in a fear run hierarchy seem more semantic than substantive.
I recall being told the story of Issac as a kid and I thought it was really messed up that a father would kill his son as a test of faith. As a kid I didn’t have the language to express how messed up I thought that was, and I’m not sure I do now. But, crazy right?
This other-worldly side of religion is built on so little evidence that it can only function as metaphor with lambs and seraphims and standing on such weak sand it leans on fear and threat to support it all. Death, death, death. If there is a wicked beauty to religion I find it in its circular con-game, you can’t even ask questions because it just takes you back to the flimsy metaphor it started with, supported with the threats and fears of death and the condemnation that you lack faith. As a kid and as an adult the stick of retribution or the carrot of eternal salvation feels like a flawed binary in support of an omniscient Santa Claus.
The parallel I’m trying to form here is that the world of social media is also weak on nuance. The trauma of these characters are all built on subjective falsehoods.
I give points to art over religion here to tackle things like inherited bias and generational trauma. In art they are given the needed room to explore their complexites. Dialogue over dogma.
Beneath the character’s pain in this show is the root (and weaponization) of both religion and social media and in that contextualization I find a broiling insecurity and distrust that drives the plot. The story that begins with a single Lebanese family, is all of us.
Adoration is a really raw opening to the 2024 Prototype season leaving me feeling excitement for what stories and sounds are up next.
Notes on the Production: