There is no doubt the opera stage has seen its fair share of blood through the years, whether it be the mad scene in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, the ethereal yet obstinate stain soiling Lady Macbeth’s hand, the crimson droplets that portend the end of Mimi in La boheme, or even the corpses of suitors scattered outside the palace of Turandot. But there’s blood and then there’s blood, as so emphatically illustrated by Anatomy Theater, composer David Lang and artist Mark Dion’s new operetta enjoying its world premiere at Los Angeles’s Redcat over five performances beginning on 16 June, part of the LA Opera’s Off Grand series.
“There’s this moment in time when people have all these different agendas for why these anatomy lessons are taking place. We thought that would be a really interesting and provocative thing to do,” Lang says of his latest, about the execution of a murderer in 17th-century England who is then dissected publicly in order to remove the malignant organs thought to be the impetus for her crime. “What’s exciting to me is through the magic of opera we can dissect this person and she can keep singing. That’s something we can offer that a real anatomy lesson can’t.”
It’s not as though Lang and company are in competition for gore-seeking audiences. The days of public dissection are long gone but not soon enough for the show’s Sarah Osborne, sung by mezzo Peabody Southwell. Raped and beaten by her stepfather at an early age, Osborne was thrown out of her house by her mother and turned to a life of prostitution. After she married her pimp, he too beat her until one night she dispensed with him by dosing his liquor and smothering him with a pillow. When the act was done, she did the same to her two small children.
As Anatomy Theater begins, she stands on the gallows about to pay for her crime. Moments later, the real work of ferreting out evil gets under way for the benefit of a paying audience. Emcee Jonathan Crouch, sung by baritone Marc Kudisch, is accompanied by anatomist Baron Peel, (bass-baritone Robert Osborne). His assistant Ambrose Strang, sung by tenor Timur, performs the dirty work of slicing into the still-warm corpse.
“My biggest challenge in the piece is I then must play dead for 45 minutes while propped up on a vertical table platform while having the boys prick and prod me and shift and bump me,” says Southwell who is nude throughout most of the production as her organs are extracted and examined for putrescent signs of malice. “I can play dead in clothes much easier. But as all of my breathing mechanism is visible and my swallowing mechanism is visible and it’s very obvious, I worked with my Pilates teacher and my meditation teacher. It’s the opposite of singer breathing. I have to find this incredibly shallow breath that I can sustain for 45 minutes.”
For all its gore and nudity, Anatomy Theater might sound like it appeals to its audience’s baser instincts but in fact it does the opposite. “The reason why this woman is executed and the reason why Donald Trump finds people to support him is because there are things in the world that we should be afraid of,” explains Lang, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his choral work, The Little Match Girl Passion, as well as an Oscar nomination for Simple Song #3 in Paolo Sorrentino’s movie, Youth.
Produced by avant-garde avatar Beth Morrison Projects, Anatomy Theater illustrates the irrational extremes a society will go to in order to protect itself. “It seems barbaric in our opera that this is the way people deal with their fear. And yet it’s something that is still present for us. And I think that’s something the Donald Trump situation really shows – this fear can’t go away. We can’t lose our vigilance in trying to keep a deeper and more philosophical and reasoned approach to how we protect ourselves.”
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