The choice to change one’s gender identity has to be one of the most difficult decisions any individual can make. Even when the internal choice is clear, the actual process is lengthy (often taking years to complete), is painful (emotionally and physically) involving massive doses of hormones and surgeries, and it’s expensive. It is not a decision to be taken lightly.
Hopefully, the end result is a person who can feel comfortable in the knowledge they have become the individual they were meant to be.
“As One,” a chamber opera for two singers and string quartet, takes on the subject of one character’s odyssey toward transgender identification. It is the first opera by composer Laura Kaminsky and is co-written by Mark Campbell and transgender writer/filmmaker Kimberly Reed. It premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2014.
On Saturday at the Beverly O’Neill Theater, conducted by Andreas Mitisek, Long Beach Opera presented “As One’s” local premiere, with two more matinee performances scheduled for Saturday and Sunday. And for those two performances, Kimberly Reed is expected to be present for the pre-performance talk.
“As One” is a project that has its heart in the right place. It takes on a difficult subject and treats it in a way that never makes its audience uncomfortable, from the gently melodic score by Kaminsky to the cuddly direction by David Schweizer and the vocally rich performances by baritone Lee Gregory and mezzo-soprano Danielle Marcelle Bond, who represent the male/female duality of the opera’s sole character, Hannah.
The problem is, in an effort to make everyone comfortable, the creative team has created a G-rated opera on an R-rated subject. With the exception of a segment devoted to global acts of violence toward transgender individuals, the opera takes a “Dick and Jane” approach to its subject. Only in this case Dick is Jane and vice versa.
Structured in 15 episodes, the opera traces a 12-year-old (unnamed) boy’s journey toward gender transformation. But rather than telling the real life story of Kimberly Reed, the co-librettists chose to only incorporate about 20 percent of her actual experiences into the libretto. The other 80 percent represents a generic template of Hannah’s transformational stages: recognition, compensation, denial, acceptance, commitment and resolution.
What’s missing is a sense of deeply engaging drama that’s willing to take risks and face up to hard realities instead of glossing them over. It’s true of the lack of bite in the bland libretto, and it’s true in the music, which develops within a very prescribed and crafted harmonic vocabulary, only shifting into spiky dissonance when the subject matter turns violent, which in itself is something of a cliché.
While both singers have strong voices, it was difficult to believe or identify with them on a realistic basis as they prance and mime their way through the opera, telegraphing rather than deeply expressing the emotional tension and pain that is central to the story.
As the episodes unfold, film projections directed by Reed provide an abstracted background to the action. As Lee Gregory sings about his childhood paper route, we see the world from his point of view over the front tire of his bike. You can almost imagine Norman Rockwell providing the illustrations.
John Donne’s poem “No Man Is an Island” becomes a thematic through line, as “Hannah Before” (no masculine name is given to the character) sees himself as the exception to Donne’s rule, adrift and apart from the rest of MAN-kind. Ultimately, as an adult, against a frigid landscape of Norwegian fjords, Hannah comes to terms with her transgender identity and her place in the world.
In the episode “Sex Ed,” old grainy black-and-white films from the 1950s illustrate the coldly analytical way the process of reproduction was taught in schools.
Ironically, “As One” often feels like it was conceived to be a modern day alternative, a gentle way to introduce young people to the idea that gender identification is an acceptable personal choice. That’s fine. Now the team needs to compose the opera for adults.
Jim Farber is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer.
‘As One’
Rating: 2.5 stars
When: 2:30 p.m. Saturday-Sunday
Where: Beverly O’Neill Theater, 300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach
Tickets: $49-$150
Running time: 70 minutes, with no intermission
Suitability: Mature subject matter
Information: 562-470-7464, www.longbeachopera.org
