Philip Glass' opera Orphée is absolutely crowded with incident.
A quick look over the Virginia Opera online plot synopsis reveals one bar fight, two hit-and-run fatalities, one or two threatened lynchings and threats of suicide, along with gunfire, coded messages (or maybe paranoid-schizophrenic hallucinations), mix-and-match romantic pairings, a scene of (more-or-less) final judgment and most crucially, two-way journeys between real life and the afterlife.
All this in less than two hours. (Harrison Opera House, Norfolk, Jan. 28-Feb 5)
The cast of characters includes three poets, one pregnant wife, one lady friend, one Princess (a personification of Death, or perhaps a succubus?), plus bikers, cops, a judge, a journalist, a probably dead chauffeur, and more.
It's a modernized version of the ancient Greek Orpheus and Eurydice myth in which the prototypical performing artist, poet, minstrel and musician Orpheus rescued his wife from the underworld.
For all its serious and many-layered content, it's also straightforward "fun," in the words of stage director Sam Helfrich. He invokes the ideas of ghosts and a "sci-fi feel," describing a show that is "full of intrigue [with] so may things to watch on stage... dynamic and fast moving – it goes like a bullet."
Composer Glass did not simply retell of the Greek myth, as dozens of other composers and librettists have done, but instead took as his foundation a 1949 film by French avante-garde artist Jean Cocteau, which set the tale in his post World War II homeland.
Glass "literally took the screenplay of the movie and set it to music, virtually word for word," says Helfrich.
That leaves directors the problem of transferring to the live stage events that were originally depicted by special effects, editing and other exclusively cinematic techniques.
For example, Cocteau made mirrors the gateways between the real word and the underworld. He filmed his actors putting a hand or a foot into a pool of the liquid metal mercury to simulate the first step of passing through a mirror, but the sort of trick photography that involves is clearly impossible in live opera.
Wanting to maintain some element of surprise, and not wanting to spoil his audience's enjoyment, Helrich won't reveal how just how his Philip Glass characters go back and forth between our world and the underworld without a single mirror onstage, but he does say that he and set designer Andrew Lieberman worked on the set design for a full year, and that he considers Lieberman "quite a genius."
"People gasped," he said, when his "way to tell the story in which the entire world is mirrored...like Orpée's world is already a world of double images," made its debut at the Cooperstown, NY, Glimmerglass Opera 4 1/2 years ago, and at its performances in Portland, Oregon in the fall of 2009. "People were leaning forward in their seats."
Virginia audiences will see "the third iteration" of a production that won critical acclaim in both places, Helfrich says, with variations in casting.
It "has nothing to do visually with the Cocteau film," he explains, "but it's the same story."
Cocteau couched Orphée in terms that were contemporary and visually, thematically relevant for a France with fresh memories of Occupation and Resistance. Helfrich places the opera in the world of today, "set in the present, as Cocteau's movie was," but in our present, not in Cocteau's of the mid-20th Century.
The world of the VOA Orphée is "not particularly French nor specifically American, but universal."
"The whole opera is about our very fundamental human problems...that's what makes people really hook into it."
While the title character is wrapped up in artistic and personal conflicts, falling for the beautiful patroness of a younger, rival poet, trying to write and believing he can decode personalized messages from gibberish he hears on the radio, wife Eurydice repeatedly tries to tell him that she is pregnant. In Helfrich's view, Orphée pretty much knows this already, but he's trying to avoid hearing it.
Rather than deal with marital troubles, and most especially rather than face the responsibilities of fatherhood, Orphée "doesn't want to hear the news....he is more interested in fame and creating himself as a public figure."
"It's fundamentally a story about marriage and midlife crisis, about the fear of getting older, the fear of childbearing...what it means to have lost your youth...marriage and relationships and things people think about every day."
Every day, important and fundamental stuff, found in a myth that is several millennia old, then transmuted though a 60-year-old film to the world of the 21st Century and onto a Norfolk stage.