I was in a packed Opera House for the third performance of San Francisco Opera's world-premiere run of The Monkey King, a kaleidoscopic new work by Huang Ruo (music) & David Henry Hwang (libretto), directed by Diane Paulus. This opera is wildly inventive, wildly colorful, wildly wild, & also substantial enough to be thought-provoking in a number of directions & well worth repeated viewings (I hope it will be revived soon, as I believe the run is pretty much sold out).
The storyline is based on the opening chapters of the very long & episodic Chinese classic novel, Journey to the West; the portion we are given is basically the Monkey King origin story. Sun Wukong, the monkey who makes himself the Monkey King & then a disciple of the Buddha, is, despite his spiritual trajectory, a rambunctious & brassy character, a variant of the Trickster God, but since he is also a King, he has some inherent responsibilities towards others that can lead him into more altruistic directions. The story of the opera is the story of his discovery of some level of selflessness & spiritual enlightenment, as he is guided through adventures & suffering by the compassionate bodhisattva Guanyin & the teachings of the Buddha.
It all makes for an emotionally & dramatically complete work, though (perhaps this is just my enjoyment speaking), as in any superhero-based tale, there is room for sequels. It was several scenes into the work, after seeing the Monkey King go underwater to gain his great weapon, & then ascend to the heavens to see the glittering, corrupt world of the powerful gods, when I started to think of The Monkey King as potentially part of a Chinese-American Ring cycle, an impression strengthened by later hopes expressed by his Buddhist teacher that the Monkey King will function as some sort of redeemer of a corrupt world. As with many of our insights, I realized this one was not unique to me: while reading the program-book on the train afterwards I found in one of the articles this very subject being discussed by the composer & librettist.
The clever & frequently ingenious production owes a lot to the brilliantly eye-catching costumes of Anita Yavich & the puppetry & design work of Basil Twist. Great stretches of iridescent silks turn into waves, or horses, or the clouds supporting heaven; the Monkey King himself is sometimes a puppet, sometimes a dancer (Huiwang Zhang), & mainly & notably a tenor, Kang Wang, who does an appropriately heroic turn in what must be a strenuous role (even with leaping & flying done by dancer or puppet), sounding as fresh & spunky at the end as at the beginning. His lines frequently end with a blazoning note, which I thought was an excellent indication of his character (though I should note a friend of mine, a singer, sympathetically found this aspect of the vocal writing exhausting). There is precedent in the novel for the Monkey King dividing himself, but the staging is seamless, with a leap giving way to a puppet, flying with the aid of black-clad puppeteers, in the style of Japanese theater. There are scenes in which singer & dancer are both in action, in particular a fight scene with representative of the gods Lord Erland (also portrayed by a singer & dancer: Joo Won Kong & Marcos Vedovetto, respectively), but it's always clear what is going on. I have to give credit to the nerves of our Guanyin, the soprano Mei Gui Zhang, most of whose role is sung while she is suspended on (or, even more nerve-wrackingly, moving on) a golden platform a bit like a lozenge or flame-shaped halo, high, very high, above the stage. The entire cast is very strong (I particularly liked the deep bass of Peixin Chen as Supreme Sage Laojun) & the chorus does astonishingly versatile work.
The visuals (the costumes, &, in particular, the make-up of the Monkey King) & the action (the acrobatics, the choreographed fights) are very influenced by Asian theater, particularly Peking Opera; the music also crosses traditional east-west borders. Though the orchestra (led with assurance by Carolyn Kuan) is largely a traditional European opera orchestra, the percussion battery includes large & medium Indonesian button gongs, a Chinese opera gong, & small Chinese crash symbols, & there is a prominent role for pipa (played by Shenshen Zhang), including a rock-god-guitar-type battle between the Monkey King & one of his heavenly opponents. But the music, though permeated by traditional Chinese sounds, is not aggressively "other" or even "exotic" to non-Chinese ears, which is why I earlier referred to it as a Chinese-American work.
This hybridization of times & cultures applies to the libretto as well, which is often agreeably slangy, a helpful reminder to those dazzled by the fairy-tale qualities of the work that there is a contemporary point underneath the dazzle. "Awesome, JE!" announces the warrior nephew of the Jade Emperor, sent by him with Heaven's latest scheme for controlling the Sun Wukong. The gods sing in chorus of how no one knows how to party the way they do. There isn't much individuality there, or dissent. A corrupt & decadent ruling caste, not only on heaven but, clearly though implicitly, here on the political earth as well. The Monkey King gathers his beleaguered monkey-subjects (or brethren) around him & announces that they will no longer be shoved aside by the powerful; joining together has made them stronger. Suffering increases the strength of the Monkey King. It's a point that applies not only to the racist approaches to Chinese & Chinese-Americans through US history, but to other disenfranchised groups.
But the political suggestions of this opera are secondary to its religious & philosophical explorations. How are we to live? is the main theme, the central & too frequently silenced question of our lives. The work opens & closes with choruses singing Buddhist sutras – the chorus, a collective, expressing poetic, spiritual thoughts in a way that suggests universalism. But during the course of the action, sutra sections are usually expressed in the powerful soprano of Guanyin, that is, not only an individual, but one removed both spiritually (by her status as an immortal bodhisattva) & physically (by her elevation above the stage) from what is happening below. She functions as a sort of musical conscience to the Monkey King. Does he truly understand, & accept, & live by, what she is expressing? Or is he just looking to her as a sort of deus ex machina to get him out of various scrapes? We have gone from the choral universalism of the opening to the individual struggle, in the toils of a baffling & illusory world, to understand, accept, & act on profound sentiments in a profound & meaningful way. As they keep saying in the Journey to the West, Splendid Monkey King! Handsome Monkey King! But after the gorgeous stage-pictures have faded, the unsettling underlying message remains: How are we to live in the world we are given?
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