Review: San Diego Opera’s ‘As One’ a heartfelt, daring mix of music and gender identity

Nov. 11, 2017 12 PM PT

In music, as in life, timing is everything. And the timing couldn’t be better for the bold, heartfelt chamber opera “As One,” which debuted in New York in 2014 and on Friday opened San Diego Opera’s 2017/2018 Detour series season.

Laura Kaminsky’s 70-minute piece will be performed again tonight and Sunday afternoon at the Joan B. Kroc Theatre in Rolando. The 580-seat venue is a spacious yet intimate setting for a production that is itself intimate and expansive.

In the age-old tradition of opera, “As One” addresses timeless themes of inner conflict — in this case, the quest for identity, acceptance and love — and makes them intensely personal and universal.

It is a daring, moving, troubling and ultimately hopeful work, sometimes all at once, about the trials and triumphs of a transgender woman. And its 16 songs, performed over the course of three acts, couldn’t be more timely.

In February, the Trump administration rolled back federal protections for transgender students.

On Tuesday, voters in Virginia made thrash-metal singer Danica Roem the first openly transgender person elected to state office.

And on Wednesday, Germany’s constitutional court ruled that a third gender category must be created for people who were born with ambiguous sexual traits or who do not identify as either male or female.

Hannah, the sole protagonist in “As One,” grows up as a questioning, conflicted boy who likes to secretly wear women’s blouses, then becomes class president and the quarterback of his high school football team.

Hannah eventually undergoes hormone treatment in San Francisco to become a woman, experiences greater conflict and self-loathing, and retreats to rural Norway, singing: Which I’ve always wanted to see / Just me / The middle of nowhere / Neither here nor there / Perfect.

The duality of Hannah is ingeniously conveyed by casting her as two characters sharing the same identity. Hannah Before is sung by baritone Kelly Markgraf. Hannah After is sung by mezzo-soprano Blythe Gaissert. Both shine, whether performing alone or in tandem, and remain on stage together for nearly all of “As One’s” 70 minutes.

Markgraf and Gaissert project warmth, power and a range of finely nuanced emotions with pinpoint articulation. They perform in tandem with San Diego’s Hausmann Quartet, which gracefully executes Kaminsky’s crisply modulated score. Video projections enhance, but do not detract from, the story.

The integration of the singing, the score and the images is generally seamless, while the projection of super titles above the stage allows attendees to follow the libretto, word for word.

The use of images of handwritten essays helps illuminate “Cursive,” during which Gaissert recounts being reprimanded by a second-grade school teacher for having a florid handwriting “like my cousin Annie.” But you can close your eyes and still fully feel the exhilaration Gaissert projects during “Three words,” one of the stand-out songs in “As One’s” second act. (Those three words are, incidentally, “Excuse me, miss.”)

Equally poignant are the wrenching lines Markgraf sings as Hannah Before during “Entire of itself,” about taking issue with John Donne’s “No Man is an Island” in a junior high school class: It isn’t true / I am an island… I need no one / No one needs me / I consigned myself / To my own island long ago / Long ago.

On a lighter note, when Markgraf sings the word “masturbation” during “Sex ed,” the Hausmann Quartet punctuates it with amusingly skittering instrumental accents as an old, black-and-white sex education movie flickers behind them.

Stirring and sometimes slyly funny, the libretto by Mark Campbell and transgender filmmaker Kimberly Reed (a former high school quarterback) is unfailingly candid and authentic in capturing Hannah’s tricky gender balancing act.

But what gives “As One” its deep resonance is its broader relevance. A thoroughly contemporary opera, it should speak to anyone who has ever been bullied, felt insecure or struggled to find their place in what remains — as Ray Davies sang in “Lola,” The Kinks’ 1970 hit about love, lust and sexual identity — a perpetually “mixed up, muddled up, shook up world.”