Maria Baranova, Courtesy of Juilliard

But Juilliard’s production of Dialogues is more than just topical—it is a moving showcase for a talented ensemble cast of performers.

Stagings of Dialogues des Carmélites tend towards monochromatic minimalism, and Louisa Muller’s production was no exception. Wilson Chin’s set turned the stage into a sparse white box; another, smaller white box with one open side and one translucent side rotated on a turntable in the middle of the stage as a kind of modular inset area. Rotate it to the open side, and the Prioress (Lauren Randolph) could be interred within it. Orient it to the closed side, and it could be the back wall of a nun’s bedroom. This versatility was helped by Yuki Nakase Link’s lighting, which could, in an instant, shift the set’s white surfaces from cold and sterile to warm and intimate.

Kara Harmon’s costumes, as well as some furniture pieces, were period, and the contrast of the pink satin gown of the pre-Carmelite Blanche (Ruby Dibble) or the tricoleur sashes of the revolutionary soldiers with the white box of the set was stylish, if hardly groundbreaking. The “Rococo in the Apple Store” aesthetic is at least as old as 2001: A Space Odyssey, but it fits Dialogues’ material so well it’s hard to find fault with it. 

Maria Baranova, Courtesy of Juilliard

One reason why Poulenc’s opera is so suited to settings that emphasize contrast is that it is notoriously ambivalent towards its own thematic and moral content. Dialogues dramatizes the deaths of women who are, as of last December, officially recognized as saints by the Catholic Church, but the meaning of those deaths as portrayed in the opera is impossible to fix conclusively on the spectrum of “courageous, venerated martyrdom” to “pointless, wasteful fanaticism.” 

It is similarly difficult to offer a conclusive reading of Blanche’s narrative. Blanche’s struggle is with a fear so all-encompassing it exists beyond any specific calamity—it is all fear, fear itself. Her story seems to ask the question: how can we live with fear? How is it possible to go on living a happy or even neutral life with any awareness of life’s senselessness and fragility? Blanche lacks whatever psychic defenses allow most people to survive the world’s uncertainty by ignoring it; she cannot rationalize fear away or distract herself from it, but remains helplessly open to it. 

Here, too, Poulenc’s allegory is elusive; the opera never answers the question of what to do about unbearable fear and doubt. A less complex work might imply that true religious faith or the spiritual sanctuary of the Carmelite Order are capable of guarding Blanche from fear, but Blanche, from her first conversation with the Prioress to the moment she ascends the scaffolding, must face the fact that faith cannot conquer fear, only live alongside it. 

Maria Baranova, Courtesy of Juilliard

In her first exchange with the Prioress, Blanche claims that God will give her strength to fight her fear, but the Prioress rebukes her: God does not test your strength, she tells her, but your weakness. A few scenes later, the Prioress herself demonstrates faith’s fickleness as a bulwark against doubt, professing on her deathbed, after thirty years in the Order, that God has become “a shadow” to her. And, of course, as the opera’s gruesome finale demonstrates, institutions of faith are not spared the senseless chaos of human history.

In addition to the ambivalence of Dialogues’ moral landscape there is its similarly nuanced musical landscape, which mingles looming terror and divine consolation. On Saturday, conductor Matthew Aucoin—a composer in his own right—led the Juilliard Orchestra skilfully through Poulenc’s field of sublime contrasts.

The cast was similarly well equipped to navigate Dialogues’ beauty and horror. Last year, on the same stage, Ruby Dibble’s sensitive, assertive Sesto was a highlight of Juilliard’s La Clemenzo di Tito. Unlike her Sesto, Dibble’s Blanche contained the occasional moments, at the top of her range, where her voice was uncharacteristically thin and harsh. Apart from these upper reaches, however, the sound was appealingly full and rounded, and her stage presence made Blanche’s fits of terror moving. Vocally, she sounded her best when singing with Moriah Berry’s Constance, whose agile soubrette was far from the largest voice onstage but certainly the sweetest. When paired together, Berry’s voice gentled Dibble and Dibble’s voice strengthened Berry’s—a compellingly appropriate dynamic for their characters.

As the Prioress, Lauren Randolph was surprisingly grounded for a student performer, with a supple and commanding voice and a passionate intensity that made her death scene genuinely frightening. Jasmin Ward brought a moving forbearance to Lidoine, but the convent MVP may well have been Anna Kelly’s Mère Marie, whose deliciously smooth and clear mezzo soprano made a vow of martyrdom sound dangerously refreshing. In the secular realm, Michael John Butler stood out as Chevalier de la Force for his fine noble tenor. 

The strength of the ensemble cast emphasized another of the opera’s elusive double dynamics, which ask us to mourn these women as individuals, each with her own relationship to faith, doubt, and her community, but also to experience them as a vocal collective. This is the duality that makes the opera’s finale so moving—the voices that drop one by one from the nuns’ “Salve Regina” are voices that are known to us, belonging to specific women. Muller’s staging and her remarkable cast worked together to maintain, within the horror of their martyrdom, the Carmelites’ humanity.

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