San Francisco Opera: Omar

I was at the San Francisco Opera's second performance of Omar, the new & recently Pulitzer-Prize winning opera by Rhiannon Giddens & Michael Abels (my understanding is that Giddens, who is best known as a banjo/violin player of Roots music, brought Abel in to help her with orchestration & similar matters; so despite the two composers I believe Omar is very much driven by Giddens, who also wrote the libretto). I found it a very powerful work. But despite its resonant emotional power, there is also something distanced about it; though there are plenty of characters – Omar himself (the heroic Jamez McCorkle), his Mother Fatima (an authoritative Taylor Raven), an enslaved woman named Julie who befriends him (the warmly generous Brittany Renee), Omar's first, sadistic "owner" & his second, more considerately paternalistic "owner" (both played with finesse by Daniel Okulitch), as well as others – & plenty of action (capture, deportation through the Middle Passage, enslavement, escape) – the opera is not really driven by either character or narrative. It is instead a contemplation & a summoning.

Some of this quality is inherent in the material. The opera is based on what we know about Omar ibn Said, an Islamic scholar from what is now Senegal who was kidnapped & sold into slavery in 1807, ending up at a plantation in North Carolina, where he wrote an account of his life; because he wrote the account in Arabic, which of course most Americans can't read, it is one of the few such narratives not mediated through a white editor or amanuensis. The libretto sticks mostly to the fragmentary historical record; at the end of Act 1, we see Omar run off, but there are no dramatic incidents along the way (no Eliza-style leaping across the ice floes); when we see him at the beginning of Act 2, he is in jail in Fayetteville, where they're trying to figure out who this oddly literate but barely English-speaking man is. There is a suggestion that he & Julie are emotionally involved, but it doesn't proceed past a suggestion; there is no love duet or anything like that. There is a scrupulous respect throughout for what we can know about the past, particularly regarding people who were not much recorded or regarded in their own time. And though the arc of the material is upward, it's not quite as far upward as we might like – the enslaved Omar escapes the plantation of the sadistic Johnson, but ends his life still enslaved, only under the comparatively benign though condescending paternalism of Owen. (The difficulties of escaping to freedom are made clear; Julie, captured by Johnson, escapes only to make her way back to Owen; as she says to her friend, the enslaved woman Katie Ellen (a robust & down-to-earth Rehanna Thelwell), the danger of traveling all the way North, particularly as a woman alone, in danger of capture & rape, was too risky). Omar & Julie end up on a more kindly run plantation, so while they're better off than they were, this is still not exactly a happy ending. But that's the historical record.

But in addition to the limits of what we know about Omar's life, the distanced approach seems to be a deliberate choice. In addition to the unwillingness to speculate too widely away from the known facts, & perhaps ending up with conventional tropes that don't do justice to these vanished individuals, there is an aspect of ritual to much of the opera. The work begins with McCorkle walking on stage from the side of the orchestra, dressed in contemporary street clothes (shorts, sneakers, a graphic t-shirt); then he is draped in the long white robes & assumes the role of Omar, singing a prayer in Arabic to Allah the Merciful. This establishes him as a Muslim & a man of learning, but it's an extended sequence & does not really push the dramatic action forward; what it does do is frame the action in spiritual & philosophical terms: how can an all-Merciful & all-Powerful Deity allow what we are about to see? At the end of the opera, similar actions unfold in reverse: Omar sings a prayer calling on those around him to follow the tenets of their faith in God, only this time he sings in English, rather than Arabic: he is communicating directly to those around him, & also to us in the audience; then McCorkle disrobes, revealing his street gear, leaving his Omar a powerful memory. Again, this isn't about dramatic action or a rousing finale; it's a call to inward searching & acknowledgement of continuing, residual injustice & a meditation on the mutations of history.

Strengthening the ritualistic aspect is Giddens's use of rhyme in the libretto, which is mostly in rhyming couplets. This was a risky choice, as such couplets can sound forced or jingly, especially over the course of almost three hours, & rhyme in the English-speaking theater often sounds comic. I was initially concerned that the rhyming would make things seem "folk-opera-ish", but it works surprisingly well as an elevated & stylized form of speech.

Omar is clearly a specific person with an unusual story, but he is also a representative of the millions of kidnapped & enslaved Africans, about whom we generally know even less than we know of Omar. So the opera's focus often goes off Omar himself onto others: during the scene depicting the Middle Passage, individuals, some of them dead by the time they sing to us, give us their experiences or emotions or histories. The dead appear throughout the evening. Omar's mother Fatima, murdered in Africa, joins with Julie in Fayetteville to urge Omar to write down his life story; she also appears to him in a dream to urge him to flee Johnson's cruelty. Disrupted but persistent family connections, particularly with mothers, haunt the opera; disrupted but continuous strands between the previous lives of the enslaved & their current lives are emphasized throughout. Julie is drawn to Omar because her own father also wore a cap, a kufi, as Omar does; he also avoided some of the same foods; though Julie wasn't raised with a knowledge of Islam, she recognizes its signs. This is one of many threads snapped by enslavement that are rewoven in the new world. There is a dance (choreography by Kiara Benn) among the enslaved at Owen's plantation; there is a caller (Katie Ellen) as in barn dancing, & the elaborate figures & lines made by the groups are clearly reminiscent of dances from some ancestral homeland (the African-style drumming in the orchestra reinforces these associations, as does the presence of a heavily costumed & masked African dancer, performed by Jermaine McGhee, whom we see throughout the show). The dancing is a moment of joy (& hearkens back to the use of ballet interludes throughout the history of opera), a sign of individuals resisting the dehumanizing mechanism of slavery, but for Owen it only reinforces his superiority: he sees his enslaved workers as childlike people, given to singing & dancing, better off under his firm but kindly guidance than on their own. Ambiguity & dual perspectives haunt everything we see in this opera.

Well, almost everything. The white people don't come off very well (but then, how could they?) The essential similarity between the sadistic Johnson & the well-meaning Owen is emphasized by having the same singer play both. I did sometimes feel their portrayal verged a bit on caricature (but then, how could it not?) But I don't see any other way to handle them; you don't want to risk making excuses or, more to the point, shifting the focus; the opera is about the experience of the enslaved, not those who enslaved them. Perhaps I was simply feeling pangs of collective racial guilt. Owen's daughter Eliza (a charmingly bird-like Laura Krumm) is the one who in a sense rescues Omar; she sees the prayers in Arabic he has inscribed on the walls of his Fayetteville jail, & though she cannot read them, she is convinced this beautiful unknown script is how God would write, & she persuades her pious father to buy Omar. It is ironic that the Islamic prayers appealed to her, as her father, a firm Christian, is convinced that though Omar is clearly a knowledgeable man, he is following a false god. Owen later is sure that he has managed to convert Omar to Christianity. The historical record, & perhaps Omar himself, is unclear on this point. But Owen's Christian faith, co-existing with (& even reinforcing) his ownership of fellow human beings, connects with the prayers in the opening & closing of the opera & is part of the work's interrogation of religious beliefs compared to actual behavior. Late in Act 2 Omar gives a reading of & commentary on the 23rd Psalm that, again, resonates ambiguously; when he speaks of what the "Lord" has done, he might be referring to the deity, or his white overseers.

The brilliant production design (Christopher Myers, I assume in collaboration with director Kaneza Schaal) is suggestive & stylized. When we walk in, a giant photo of the actual Omar appears on the golden curtain. The first scene takes place in front of tall ambiguously domed pale tan cloth shapes: they look like the buildings of Omar's native city, but also suggest headstones, a reminder of time & impending tragedy & death. Banners & draperies, often covered with flowing Arabic script, are frequently used, as are ropes, shaped into suggestions of other forms: for example, towards the end, on the Owens plantation, there is a giant branching tree, made out of knotted ropes; this suggests not only the rigging of a Middle Passage ship, but also the long history of lynching, as well as the ropes used to hold the enslaved captive, or during their labor. During the Middle Passage scene, there is a projection of a woodcut showing how the captives are laid out tightly in the hold of a ship; the same image appears later printed on the fabric worn by some of the enslaved women. Other costumes are covered with Arabic script or other images. The silhouettes are period-appropriate, but, in keeping with the style of the work, they are stylized & layered with symbolism. 

During the intermission the man beside me turned to me & after we both agreed we were impressed with the opera he said his ex-wife was attending it next week & he was trying to figure out how to describe the music to her. Well, music is notoriously difficult to convey in words. It is, like the rest of the production, richly layered: there are reminiscences of African drumming, Black spirituals (particularly in a mournful work song from those suffering at Johnson's plantation), American folk music, minimalism, & more, but all these influences, in a very American way, syncretically create something new & captivating. The music also flowed in a convincing way, rather than breaking down into discrete sections. I assume Giddens has never worked on this large scale before, but she brings it off, so credit to her (& also Michael Abels, & to her for realizing she could use his assistance, & also to conductor John Kennedy for leading the orchestra).

Omar formed a provocative contrast with the other new opera on SF Opera's fall schedule, Mason Bates's The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs. Both center on a single man, but that's about as far as the resemblance goes. A friend of mine was surprised by my boredom at the Jobs opera, as the music is quite sprightly. But that opera is relentlessly focused on Jobs, in a mostly positive light, & to me the effect was like a lengthy commercial for a product I'm not interested in buying, & even if the jingle is extremely catchy, after a while that gets to be part of the problem. I also felt that the Jobs opera already felt a bit dated: hadn't the time passed when "we" looked up to our tech overlords, & admired rather than questioned their approach & methods? Haven't we heard enough from & about them? By contrast, Omar gives us a whole world previously barely hinted at in the Opera House, & despite or because of its ritualistic, somewhat withheld quality, this opera is profoundly moving in its exploration of the historically disappeared. Sometimes going backward is the way forward.