American Tragedy

In December I was at the world premiere of Tobias Picker's An American Tragedy at the Metropolitan Opera. This is an adaptation of what I wrote to someone who sort of liked it but thought that, accomplished as Nathan Gunn was in the lead role, he didn't project anguish:
Thanks for the interesting thoughts. I'm afraid I have to disagree with you on Gunn's ability to project anguish. In thinking over the roles I've seen him in, I think he did that amazingly as Zurga in the Pearl Fishers, and I also felt his anguish as Clyde at the very end of the opera. Before that I don't think Clyde, as presented in the opera, is anguished, but more of a restlessly yearning, craving young man. After all, he's doing pretty well until Roberta is pregnant -- he's getting better jobs, he has two beautiful women in love with him, he's on the way up. He seems like someone whose life is guided by wishful thinking, and when reality in the form of pregnancy intrudes, he's unmoored enough to think of elimination as the best result. What Gunn wasn't, in my opinion, was the more hollow, passive character of the book, though this may have been a change in the character due to the more dramatic nature of the stage.
What I found fascinating, and risky, about the opera, is that the center of it is Clyde, and he's an enigma. I go back and forth about him, as I did in the book (this to me is why A Place in the Sun is different from the opera and the novel, since it's set up as a doomed romance; in the other two the women are much more evenly balanced). To me the most amazing thing about Gunn's performance is that he manages to maintain audience sympathy at all, especially given the power of Racette's performance. When he comes bounding on stage in his singlet-style swimsuit right after Roberta's heart-breaking letter it's hard not to want to kill him. (Hmm, I guess that's the Clyde in me coming out. . . .).
I also had some reservations about the end. I thought Gene Scheer (the librettist) on the whole did an amazing job compressing and dramatizing a complex set of incidents, but removing Orville Mason's class hatred for Clyde (a slightly misplaced hatred, since he assumed Clyde was rich) and making him a political client of the family removes Mason's motivation for his extreme hostility to Clyde (shoving him while arresting him, repeatedly referring to him as "boy"). And though Dolora Zajick was powerful as the mother, I felt that in the final scene (I felt this especially the second time I saw it) her acting was a little too much the generalized anguished mother (she had one final gesture with an outstretched arm that was beautifully DW Griffith, but perhaps not the more restrained gesture of a woman whose strong Christian faith had rendered her more stoic when faced with the evils of the world). That's another interesting difference I felt the opera had from the novel: in the opera there was no reason to see the mother's Christian faith as shabby or fanatical or narrow-minded. It seemed like a powerful and possible alternative to the gospel of prosperity preached by the rest of the Gilbert clan. So I had different reactions to the end each time I saw it. The first time I felt, with the appearance of the hymn-singing boy, that Clyde had achieved some sort of inner peace. The second time, his anguish seemed greater, and I read it as Clyde experiencing utter despair, since even turning back to the faith of his childhood hadn't saved him. I have to say I sort of preferred the second reading. I had no moral or aesthetic objections to the first; it's just a matter of personal preference. I preferred the novel's slow fade into obscurity to the movie's more glam conclusion. (The novel, by the way, I found sensitive, powerful, and moving; I had avoided Dreiser for years, thinking he would be clumsy and overly earnest; his prose is clumsy but his insights are not.)
I keep thinking of this opera in relation to several others: Billy Budd, because both deal with inadvertent killers and bring up profound issues of justice and society; Dead Man Walking, because of the struggle towards redemption and death; and Madama Butterfly, because so much of it is like Butterfly told from Pinkerton's point of view. (These associations were jogged by the artists, of course, since Gunn is a celebrated Billy, Graham created the role of Sister Helen, and I'm hearing Racette as Butterfly in June.) To me the emotional specificity of music tends to come with repeated viewings/hearings, so this new opera faces the same problem as other new works: it's competing with moments seared into my consciousness. I would happily see it again, which is not something I can say of some other operas (for instance, Dr. Atomic, and I have to say I'm annoyed at some of the reviews of An American Tragedy which cite Dr. Atomic as a more daring work -- it has more obvious avant-garde credentials, but dramatically it not only is largely unsuccessful in my opinion but it offers no structural innovations for anyone who has heard Messiah or the Bach Passions and few musical surprises; though I liked the music, during most scenes I thought, well, it's X type of scene, so Adams is writing X type of music. To me making the ambiguous figure of Clyde the center of the work represents a subtler challenge to conventional dramaturgy than anything in Dr Atomic).