Cory Weaver

It’s remarkable how much Mazzoli’s music can externalize from her characters’ interior worlds, but also from the elusive communality of many bodies collected in one space, like The Listeners’ ensemble cast of cultists or a packed opera house. Given all Mazzoli is able to show through her score, it is disappointing that Royce Vavrek’s libretto and Lileana Blain-Cruz’s production both insisted on telling us, repeatedly, what the music has already helped us to know.

The Listeners, which I previewed ahead of its Philadelphia premiere, tells the story of Claire Devon (Nicole Heaston), a woman driven to the brink by an intense and debilitating humming sound that is as devastating to her as it is inaudible to others. The hum pushes Claire out of her roles as wife and mother, out of her job teaching high school, and into the arms of a cult of fellow sufferers, the titular “Listeners,” whose charismatic leader Howard (Kyle Ketelsen) claims he can unlock his followers’ inner potentials and remake them anew. The Listeners compare the hum to appliances buzzing, to jackhammers, and to car engines; they blame it on secret government test sites and cell phone towers. Like an acoustic environmental illness, the hum is an externalization of its hearers’ various points of alienation from modernity.

It is curious that an opera so centered on an unsolvable mystery—the hum itself, which pulses throughout, embedded ominously in the orchestration—should at times be so given to overdetermination and cliché.

Cliché’s gravitational pull upon the piece was perhaps clearest in the periodic interludes where cult members performed filmed confessions, describing their worst impulses and actions directly to Howard’s camera with the live footage of their faces projected onto a massive scrim. The projections alone would have been enough to render these interludes tiresome (opera acting was really never meant to be seen so up close, especially not with a slight but extremely distracting lag between the camera feed and the performance onstage), but the writing didn’t help.

Far from creating an understanding of Listeners cult members as nuanced individuals, the confessionals were a recitation of overwrought cliches: domestic abuse, self harm, Daddy issues. The sole exception was Jared V. Esguerra, who, as Vince, managed to imbue his miniature aria about the hum’s potential for sexual ecstasy with an easy-going charm and an irresistibly smooth tenor—all while vaping into the camera.

Similar cliches plagued Claire’s scenes with her family, despite the best efforts of Sankara Harouna, stepping in on short notice as Claire’s husband Paul, whose rich baritone was as immediately likable as his affable stage presence. As their daughter Ashley, Jasmine Habersham suffered from a somewhat under-focused tone, which proved an unfortunate match for the character’s role as the haranguing mouthpiece of domestic melodrama. In an opera with an intriguingly forward-thinking skepticism towards the inherent value of the nuclear family, one would hope for a slightly more grounded relationship between Claire and her daughter. As it is, it was fairly easy to dismiss Claire’s familial duties as, basically, annoying.

On the other hand, The Listeners had its share of moments that departed from the obvious and headed straight to the sublime—a credit not only to Mazzoli but also to the efforts of conductor Enrique Mazzola, who kept the musical proceedings moving at a vivid clip. The actual workings of the cult, for example, were shrouded in obscurity and metaphor; Howard urged cult members to “strike a chord,” he led them through ritualized hand motions, he promised to “peel off the bad, rotten, weighty layer” of their souls. What exactly it meant to strike a chord or shed one’s rotten layer didn’t need to be addressed in words, not with the voices of the chorus falling eerily into tone clusters and the strings scouring and scraping beneath them.

These moments where the music was given free reign to elaborate upon the words were the opera’s most transporting. It was downright terrifying, for example, to end an act with the cult-chorus’s voices rising into a cacophony of shared insanity while the orchestra shuddered and splintered into a wreckage of sound beneath them. Overwhelmingly, the cast was strong enough to carry the moments of nuance and ambiguity they were given.

As Howard, for example, Kyle Ketelsen matched the intensity of his stage presence with a powerfully seductive baritone voice that turned self-help platitudes into deep, lyrical lures. Also seductive was Claire’s aria, sung by Nicole Heaston with a sonically pure, open-throated abandon that befitted a woman on the verge. When Claire howled at the night sky like a wounded animal, it was genuinely hair-raising.

Cory Weaver

A similar tug-of-war between abstraction and literalism characterized Lileana Blain-Cruz’s production, now staged at the Lyric by revival director Mikhaela Mahoney after time in Norway and Philadelphia. The sets, by Adam Rigg, embedded little boxes of hyperrealism—Claire’s house with its two-car garage, her classroom with its overhead fluorescent lighting—within a series of flat landscape paintings. The flats resembled scenic backdrops from Hollywood’s studio era, rendering the mountain horizons of Claire’s southwestern suburb in dreamy pinks and oranges.

The overall effect of these inset pockets of here-and-now realism that ambulated on turntable tracks through a flatly artificial landscape was subtly nightmarish, like waking up in one’s childhood house, only to look out the window and find it trapped on a studio soundstage.

Cory Weaver

The staging, however, was not free of The Listeners’ tendency to combine the subtly expressive with the cringily cliché—in this case the ever-present cameras, projecting live feeds of cultists’ confessionals, Instagram livestreams, and TV news broadcasts, all without much theatrical success, as well as a coyote played by a dancer. The coyote was an interesting narrative foil for Claire, as another desperate animal, caged by the suburban sprawl that turned the desert into a cul-de-sac.

A dancer low-lunging her way across the stage in capri pants and a pointy-eared headband, however, belonged neither to the hyperrealist world of Claire’s classroom nor to the technicolor dream of the backdrops. She looked, in other words, like she had wandered onstage from some other production entirely, perhaps a particularly grimly Regie take on Cunning Little Vixen.

Ultimately, The Listeners bucked cliche with its ending, which saw Claire rejecting the open arms of her nuclear family in favor of her chosen family—the cult, over which she has assumed leadership. As the curtain fell on Claire’s suburban street, transformed by the Listeners into a space of anarchic mysticism, the cultists and the opera itself struck their finest chord: thrumming with dread, confusion, and sublimity, the chord of the hum.