Redención

Music by Johanny Navarro
Libretto by José Félix Gómez Aponte
Thompson Street Opera Company, November 2022 (North American premiere)

This was a beautiful little opera, though the story was somewhat painful. Redención stood out to me for two reasons - the intense story of two lost souls reaching out for salvation, and the breathtaking score. Unlike a lot of contemporary opera I've encountered, the music of Redención is littered with beautiful, flowing, consonant melodic lines. It's still a complex piece, written for piano, violin, mezzo, and baritone, but you'll come away from it with something to hum. There's something oddly rewarding about being able to listen to a show and not engage the part of your brain that's trying to unravel frequently-changing time signatures and atonal recit.

I had to do some work on the translation to get this piece reading how I'd like in the space. The initial translation was solid, but there were a few pitfalls I had to navigate, including some Google Translate errors, and some overly-literal translations. In order to further differentiate the voices of the characters, I re-translated much of the dialog to give Agnés a more formal, mature tone, and León a scrappier, more colloquial voice. The challenge here was making the voices discernible without losing any of the skill either character has as a poet or writer.

Redención is a beautiful and intimate examination of two people in very different circumstances, who share more than meets the eye. The piece explores loss, isolation, family, poetry, faith, and imprisonment - both the walls we find ourselves within and the walls within our minds. Being a shorter piece (about 26 minutes), even with a truncated rehearsal schedule, we were able to dive into the lives of these characters in a fulfilling and evocative way.

I try to keep my process open-minded as we go into rehearsals, and enjoy getting suggestions and feedback from my performers and collaborators. I also enjoy going into rehearsals with a complete skeleton built for the show, so that stage management could take over and more-or-less stage the show in my absence. Creating a functional sandbox for my team is always my top priority, and we did that in spades.

One interesting challenge around this piece was adapting the staging to our odd little venue. The Lab at Otherworld is only twenty feet deep, with no fixed seating save for a small riser that can hold 4-5 chairs. I had to lay out the space in such a way that we could fit a reasonable amount of audience members while still allowing room for our instrumentalists, conductor, and a playing space that wouldn't feel as restrictive as it was. I ended up settling with the musicians in a rear corner of the space, off stage left, and a long, narrow performing space that never exceeded 10 feet in depth. We split the stage into a world for each character, both arranged in a similar way, with similar functionality, but illustrating the differences between their situations. Agnés' recliner and writing table were countered by León's prison cot and a plastic folding chair. Her stationery and nice pens stood opposite the steno pads and prison-safe pens for León - think Bic pens that have had their plastic outer layer stripped off, leaving on the flimsy ink cylinder (preventing them from being used as tools or weapons). As we threw audience focus back and forth as they both wrote and read letters to and from each other, the inequity was laid bare - but on closer inspection, the similarity of their situation became clearer and clearer. A life wracked with the unimaginable loss that Agnés has experienced can turn even the most cozy home into a gilded prison.

Given this small space, how we used lights and simultaneous action became a pillar of the show. It was important to me that any time one character was writing or sharing a story, the other was reading it in real time - there are little breadcrumbs of plot to be experienced based on the reactions of each of these characters to the traumas and stories shared by their counterpart. Knowing that we would always have a degree of light spill in such an intimate space, we never brought the lights fully down on their character, encouraging he audience to occasionally check in on the other character to see if there was something to take note of. The rapid pace of the show, the fluidity of these transitions, and the necessary evil of the audience having to reference the supertitles made the piece aggressively engaging, rewarding audience members who could let their focus shift between these three foci. It would be problematic to lean on a mechanism like this for too long, but I believe it was appropriate for such a short, concentrated opera.

I hope the composer continues to produce work of this quality and explore longer narratives. This piece could likely flex out another 15 minutes while still maintaining this pace, but allowing us as an audience to get even more engrossed in the lives of these two characters. Given the beauty of the music, I know audiences would be enthusiastic to spend more time in the melancholy beauty of a soundscape that carries us through this touching and harrowing tale.