Glass: In the Penal Colony
Libretto by Rudolph Wurlitzer after the original story by Franz Kafka
John Duyker (tenor) - the Visitor
(alternating with Tony Boutté)
Herbert Perry (baritone) - the Officer
(alternating with Eugene Perry)
Jesse J. Perez (actor) - Kafka
Sterling K. Brown (actor) - Soldier
Steven Rishard (actor) - the Condemned Man
JoAnne Akalaitis (stage direction)
John Conklin (set design)
Alan Johnson (musical direction)
Thursday 21 June 2001
Classic Stage Company, New York City
How odd that America's most famous opera composer isn't very good at telling a story. Philip Glass' most acclaimed stage works — Satyagraha, Akhnaten, The Voyage and (controversial though it be) the legendary Einstein on the Beach — are iconography, not narrative. When he has a tale to tell in music, Glass comes... not to grief, exactly, just to nowhere in particular.
The plot of In the Penal Colony is more eventful than one might expect from Kafka. The incoming (and unseen) commander of an island penal colony off the coast of Africa sends a friend of his, a diplomat known only as the Visitor, to view the colony's method of executing condemned prisoners and report back on whether or not it should be discontinued. That method turns out to be a particularly horrifying case of letting the punishment fit the crime: a machine with hundreds of needles which inscribe onto the prisoner's body the law he has broken. After six hours in the machine, the prisoner achieves "a moment of enlightenment" and dies.
The execution the Visitor is to witness gets called off at the last moment when a portion of the machine breaks down. (Spare parts are hard to come by in the colony.) The Visitor tells the resident Officer, who is fiercely devoted to both the machine and the previous Commander, that he will nevertheless recommend against continuing such executions; the Officer then places himself into his machine and dies.
This is high-octane stuff, full of stark emotional and moral conflict that should thrive on operatic treatment. But the temperature of Glass' music never rises to match the events or the characters' emotional states. At the work's beginning, soft, busy arpeggios for string quintet convey effectively the fear and unease lurking underneath the Visitor's diplomatic politesse. Yet the string writing never moves much beyond that initial mood, while the vocal writing (which feels rather disconnected from the instrumental parts) is largely glorified Sprechgesang. The effect, at least in a staging as visually interesting as this one, is of a theater piece with incidental music — and not terribly consequential music at that. Audiences paying hefty ticket prices to see a Philip Glass opera will likely — and reasonably — be disappointed.
At least what they got here was well-executed. John Duykers was somewhat dry of voice, but he sang accurately, his every word was clear, and he acted the role of a diffident, morally troubled old diplomat to perfection. As the resident Officer, Herbert Perry projected ferocious devotion to his former Commander and everything he represented, along with palpable anger and menace. Steven Rishard and Sterling K. Brown characterized their non-speaking roles very effectively; Jesse J. Perez was thoughtful, amusing and bemusing in the Greek-chorus speaking role of Kafka himself.
Set designer John Conklin dealt handsomely with the fiendish problem of rendering the execution machine on stage; JoAnne Akalaitis — notwithstanding her insertion of a few brief and unrelated dance sequences (which her actors, incredibly, managed to execute in character) — handled the theatrical element well, conveying the emotional, physical and moral turmoil that Glass' music missed.
