Maria Baranova

Composer Aaron Siegel and librettists Siegel and Mallory Catlett presented their new opera, Rainbird, at Mabou Mines last week. The opera is based on the 1968 novel, Yellow Flowers in the Antipodean Room, by New Zealand author Janet Frame. The novel is about an unexceptional suburban family man, Godfrey Rainbird, who is hit by a car and pronounced dead, only to awaken in the morgue days later. His life is forever after changed.

Remembering nothing of his time on the other side, Godfrey is accused of blasphemy by his community after his resurrection, partly because his experience denies their belief in the afterlife. He’s fired from his job, his children are taken away from him, his neighbors harass him, and his wife dies by suicide. Previously a very ordinary man, Godfrey’s return from the dead estranges him totally from his life.

Siegel’s opera takes dreamlike jetés through Frame’s narrative. The audience is in no way overburdened with context, information, or detail. Catlett and Siegel’s charming and trippy libretto uses Frame’s original language to create something new. The stage at Mabou Mines contained abstracted picket fences and grass, a church steeple, and a miniature house and pigeon coop that doubles as the Rainbirds’ bed. The music creates a dense, percussive, achingly romantic sound with violin, ukelele, xylophone, and toy piano. The opera includes folk songs, arias, and spoken word portions, often layered on top of each other. The music is playful and warmly held, creating a fairy tale quality in stark contrast to the intensity of the subject matter.

The chant-like singing builds to a spectral, ritualized sound. The vocal performers take you on unexpected journeys. Gelsey Bell, performing as Godfrey’s wife, is an exceptionally engaged and dynamic performer, whether singing or speaking, her voice imbued with nuance and intentionality. Chris DiMeglio, performing as Godfrey, leaps several octaves in single bounds, traipsing from chest voice to falsetto while keeping a solid core. His voice is a weird and lively instrument, and while it is a bit overused, it still manages to hold together the opera’s quirky treasure trove of sound fragments. Katie Geissinger, performing as Godfrey’s relative, creates bell-like tones of beauty and simplicity, giving solidity to the airy and fluttering music.

The performers’ raw and simple acting was well-suited to the music. The spoken word portions nail the opera down to an archetypal naturalism, melding together new music and vaudeville. Jeff Tobias’s characterizations as Godfrey’s anxious, desperate supervisors, and Shurmi Dhar’s performance as Godfrey’s whimsical nurse (among other characters) paint a charming pathway of prose through the teeming wilderness of instrumentation.

Author Janet Frame wrote 12 novels in her lifetime, many of which dealt with romantic visionaries and madness. Frame spent years of her life in and out of psychiatric hospitals after a mental breakdown driven by the deaths of her sisters. While institutionalized, she underwent hundreds of electroshock treatments and narrowly avoided a lobotomy by winning a prestigious New Zealand literary award. While Godfrey Rainbird may not remember what he saw on the other side, Frame seems to have traveled from spirit to flesh and back again with fair frequency. Siegel’s opera captures something sharp, fanciful, and bizarre in Frame’s writing. Although the opera bulges in places, overstuffed with too many bits and notions, at its core it is extremely fine and a testament to the original material