Maria Baranova

To Jason, a teenager at the turn of the 21st century, the beauty of collecting records is that everything is available: he can travel in time between his own moment and the flower power ’70s, and listen to everything from hit singles to long-lost studio outtakes, in every genre, from every pop star or cult personality.

That’s also the storytelling strategy of the opera in which he is a character: Eat the Document by composer John Glover (no relation to the great character actor, I assume), librettist Kelley Rourke, and director Kristin Marting, based on the novel of the same name by Dana Spiotta. It received its world premiere last Thursday, at the opening night of this year’s PROTOTYPE Festival of new operas, in the black box theater of the HERE Arts Center.

The piece slides back and forth in time between the detonation of the bomb that—unbeknownst to Jason (played by Tim Russell)—changed his mother’s life a decade before he was born, and her reunion 30 years later with the man who conspired with her to plant it.

To the credit of its creative team, Eat the Document compresses a decades-long, nonlinear story into a swift 90 minutes while still finding time to pause for reflection. They trust their audience to put the pieces together, even though presenting a number of characters at different ages in a small-scale stage production means that each singer plays multiple characters, the main characters are played by multiple singers, and the unit set is transformed by context clues or discreet supertitles into multiple locations or moments in time.

A little disorienting, maybe, but worth it for the ways in which it plays out the story’s themes of unstable politics and identities. The consistently appealing cast at the premiere was led by Danielle Buonaiuto as Mary, alias Caroline—the young radical who goes on the run after a bombing goes terribly wrong—and Amy Justman as the middle-aged Mary, alias Louise, Jason’s mother, so that we get to see Mary literally become a different person as she attempts to leave her past behind. Her lover and co-conspirator Bobby, also on the run, was played by Paul Pinto in middle age, now going by the name Nash and running an anarchist bookstore and community center.

But Danielle Buonaiuto also played the twentysomething Miranda, Bobby’s ’90s love interest, making us wonder if he’s seeing something of Mary in her, while 1970s Bobby as well as an unstable bookstore patron were both played by Tim Russell, contrasting Jason against two different models of disaffected young manhood. In designer Peiyi Wong’s unit set, Jason’s record collection became the display bins at the bookstore, whose bookshelves in turn became the tchotchke rack at an Urban Outfitters-style corporate hipster retailer, blurring sincere engagement with radical culture into its commodification. Times, places, faces and names all change, yet all somehow remain the same.

Maria Baranova

Glover’s score plays the same trick, sliding between genres of classic rock and pop, between scenes of through-composed dramatic dialogue and anthemic rock & roll numbers, all the while maintaining a steady rhythmic and dramatic momentum. In a reversal of what one might expect from a piece of musical theater, I found the almost Janácek-like moments of dialogue far more compelling than the big songs, which must be at least partly intentional—after all, those anthems are largely the diatribes of ’90s slacktivists getting high on their own self-righteousness—but still, I couldn’t help thinking that they could use a little more wit, a little more polish.

Some of the show’s most delightful musical moments are the references to Pet Sounds–style Beach Boys a cappella harmonies in the ensemble choruses, and a fleeting but unforgettable moment of instrumental alt-country pastiche at the moment the year 2000 arrives, so I know that Glover has those tools in his composing kit. But I can also appreciate his and Rourke’s challenge in writing self-aware songs from the point of view of characters distinctly lacking in self-awareness. As it stands, the show could drop at least one of those rock songs entirely without losing anything.

The score’s shifts in genre, and the dramas shifts in identity, often translate to shifts in vocal register, from Broadway belt to operatic lyricism, and incredibly, every member of the cast was equal to the task. Most remarkable was Paul Chwe MinChul An, who sang his mentally unstable Vietnam vet Henry in a bellow that made my throat ache, delivered a few clipped lines in a smooth basso as the inventor of napalm, and sat down at the piano to tickle the ivories and croon in a surprising cameo as the Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson, all in a single evening. (Between the capitalist bubblegum pop product that defined their early reputation, the operatic ambitions of their Pet Sounds and failed Smile projects, and their proximity to the psychedelic psychosis of the Manson Family and the unraveling of the dream of the ’60s, the Beach Boys are key to the themes of this piece.)

Maria Baranova

Other vocals of special note: Justman’s songbird soprano, and Adrienne Danrich’s generous, mezzo-hued instrument as radical feminist Mel. The smooth tenor of Michael Kuhn proved almost as handsome as his grin, appropriate to his all-too-seductive role as culture jammer turned corporate sellout Josh.

The singers were amplified, as was the compact onstage band. Mila Henry led an all-star string quartet, electric guitar and drums from the keyboard of an upright piano, and the band kept up with the nonstop pulsing of the mercurial score through every shift in tempo or genre.

The last scene of the opera weaves it all together. The drama is underscored by a reprise of the anthemic opening chorus, the band rocks out in the background, we’ve finally learned the awful truth of what went wrong with the bombing 30 years ago, and at long last Mary/Louise confronts her younger self as well as Bobby/Nash across a kitchen table. It’s a goosebump moment, and one that the opera has been racing towards with a musical and dramatic inevitability.

This was my first encounter with his work for the stage, but I’m eager to see more. Eat the Document fits easily into a tiny theater, but it feels bigger—it could easily fill a medium-sized hall. This tightly constructed piece about our relationship to the past should itself have a bright future, as should the outstanding team that brought it to life.

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