2 min read Opera

I Will Fly Like A Bird

I Will Fly Like A Bird
Jonathan Wilson, Marissa Simmons, Nathaniel Hill, and Jennifer Barrett in I Will Fly Like a Bird | Thompson Street Opera Company
Music by John Plant
Libretto by J. A. Wainwright
Thompson Street Opera Company, September 2019 (US premiere)

This beautiful chamber opera was written to honor the life and death of Robert Dziekanski, a Polish man who lost his life while trying to immigrate to Canada in 2007. It was written in 2012 for mezzo-soprano and baritone soloists, clarinet, string quartet and piano.

“Knowing when to step away and let an audience sit with their feelings is the sign of a terrific director, for it suggests a release of control that must be maintained most of the time to tell the story. Matsuda was not afraid to let his bird fly, and the audience was the recipient of his largess.”
- Aaron Hunt, Chicago Theatre Review

This show was a fascinating challenge to be working on a script based on real world events – it leads to serious thought about how to approach the facts of the event. You really need to analyze the event, the people attached to it, and make difficult decisions on which facts matter & which ones could turn into red herrings for the audience. There will be facets of the story can that inform your performers and enrich the story; there will be details that may be fascinating to you, but confusing to the audience, or that don’t serve the narrative presented in the libretto. After years of working on pieces of fiction, this was an excellent opportunity.

One major challenge of the piece was its intimate nature. The cast included only a baritone and mezzo voice – we had the opportunity to cast a few supers, but ended up deciding against it, focusing the story very tightly just on Robert and his mother. This decision made a lot of other variables fall into place rather nicely – if any character wasn’t explicitly mentioned in the libretto, they no longer had a place in this story. Information about them gave us some insight about the primary characters, but we knew that exploring factual details about their relationships wouldn’t improve the audience experience.

Music director Alexandra Enyart and the musicians were excellent advocates for Plant’s compelling score… Ross Kyo Matusuda’s stage direction was just as accomplished… [he] was most resourceful in utilizing the small, barren space…
- Lawrence A. Johnson, Chicago Classical Review

Directing opera is extremely rewarding. You have so many more narrative guides from everything you can intuit from the music & additional artistic collaborators in the form of your music director and the instrumentalists themselves. The additional pieces of the puzzle give you guidance (it’s much easier to agree on subtext when it’s given to you in the orchestration), and challenge your preconceived notions. Any actions you embark upon, or conceits for moments you develop, absolutely must be in agreement with the music. It’s a little easier having these additional signposts to guide your work, but it necessitates a deeper awareness of your creative choices as anything you try to force into a place it doesn’t musically belong will stick out like a sore thumb.

During tech week of the opera, we were fortunate enough to have John Plant, the composer, join us. His enthusiasm and kindness were a joy during that stressful time. The production went off smoothly, and I believe we effectively used the black box theater at the Athenaeum well – the space was organized into a horseshoe, with the small orchestra front and center, playing spaces surrounding them on all sides, including an upstage platform. With a small pit, this helped us maintain good acoustic balance, easy sightlines, and allowed us to highlight the instrumentalists when the focus of the storytelling shifted more into their hands than the action onstage necessitated.