“The Difficulty of Crossing a Field,” David Lang’s enigmatic opera based on a very short story by Ambrose Bierce, has a lot in common with films by Quentin Tarantino.
That’s what one fan said at the party after the work’s Saturday night revival by the Long Beach Opera, and he is right. Tarantino’s films feature a time scheme that tells a story in patches, past and present, forward and back. And Lang’s work, a wonderfully modern riff on Bierce’s very short original with a complex libretto by Mac Wellman, does the same. The story is told but not in strict order, and Mr. Williamson, played by company regular Mark Bringelson (he played the same role in the 2011 production) actually disappears twice.
Tarantino is a contemporary filmmaker and this opera — written on commission in 2002 for Carey Perloff and the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco — though based on an 1888 short story, is a very modern version. In the Mitisek design, also used in the 2011 version, the rich and tuneful music is played by the Lyris Quartet, conducted by Kristof Van Grysperre, set on a platform in the expensive seats of the Terrace Theater.
The audience is on stage, with all the action taking place in the hall: Mrs. Williamson (Suzan Hanson, reprising her role of three years ago) rises on the stage elevator, her skirts more than 10 feet tall. The field is represented by a lit platform stretching from the stage to the back of the orchestra, and the inquest trial takes place with the judge standing at the front of the backlit first balcony.
The story itself is framework only for the opera, which looks at the relations between black slaves and their masters, between the suffocating and violent world of slavery (as embodied by James C. Calhoun) and at their spiritualistic ideas. Does Williamson really disappear? What happens to everyone after the event?
Then there’s the beautiful and eerily appropriate music played by the quartet: violinists Alyssa Park and Shalini Vijayan, violist Caroline Buckman and cellist Timothy Loo, conducted with delicacy by Van Grysperre. The story is for scholars, perhaps, but the music is delicious.
Bringelson and Hanson are only two of five cast members returning from the 2011 production. Valerie Vinzant is the Williamson girl who believes that the reason her father disappeared is because he didn’t talk to the horses. She is in front of the audience, clear-eyed and strong voiced, trying to find out what happened to her father. Eric B. Anthony is another veteran of the production, and as Boy Sam, the black house slave who is also mystified, he and Vinzant take two parts of the same vocal line as they sit, back to back, contemplating the fact that will change everything. Robin T. Buck is the last of the veterans, and he is a commanding vocal presence.
Karole Foreman is Virginia Creeper, and she sings, along with the ensemble, about the new world they are going to build for themselves, a world that was very revolutionary then and isn’t even completed now. Their dedication to that world and to change is extraordinarily different from the very old-fashioned world of the plantation, and though nothing is said about what happens, the opera’s tension is based on those very different worlds.
Two more performances remain and, if you want to see how the world has changed, if you want to hear how modern music and stagecraft can make their own way in the world, or if you are a Tarantino fan, go see “The Difficulty of Crossing a Field.”
John Farrell is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer.
