Bulrusher at West Edge Opera

West Edge Opera opened their annual summer festival of three opera productions last Saturday in the Scottish Rite Temple at Oakland's Lake Merritt.

The opener was Bulrusher, the company's first commissioned world premiere, and it attracted a good crowd, including legendary mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade, above right.

Bulrusher started life as a 2006 play by Eisa Davis about race, sex, maternity, and nature-based mysticism in the secluded Northern California hamlet of Boonville in 1955. The composer Nathaniel Stookey (above left) has been working on his operatic adaptation for over half a decade and the music is complex and often exquisite.

The overall results, however, were mixed. Emily Senturia conducted the chamber orchestra in a lovely performance, highlighted by Keisuke Nakagoshi on the piano. The scenic and projection design by Yuki Izumihara, with its depictions of river and forest, was unobtrusively evocative.

The direction by NJ Agwuna, though, was often clumsy, especially the decision to rearrange a group of circular benches into a new configuration after each of the many scenes, which stopped the flow of the opera while never really adding any scenic versimilitude.

The bench moving was handled by a musically talented quintet (Lily Bogas, Phoebe Dinga, Julia Hathaway, Michael Jesse Kuo, and Carmello Tringali), who functioned as more of a Greek chorus than individuated Boonville townspeople. They were also directed to stand and sit around with colored light globes in various scenes which looked more goofy than magical. (All production photos are by Cory Weaver.)

The soprano Shawnette Sulker did a fine job as the 18-year-old title character who was found as a baby floating in a basket down the Navarro River. Raised by the town's schoolteacher, she has lived as something of an internal exile because of her race, clairvoyant powers, and the refusal of her guardian to let her speak Boontling, the local slang (for instance, "heel scratchin" for "sex"). At first, some of the dialogue was incomprehensible, but like the invented slang in A Clockwork Orange, it soon became understandable in context.

Among the many plot strands, there was a love triangle between the schoolteacher (Matt Boemer), the town brothel's Madame (Rebecca Cuddy) and the other black person in Boonville, Logger (Kenneth Kellogg).

Much of the narrative was set in motion by the arrival in a storm of Vera, a young refugee from Alabama, who is Logger's niece. Mezzo-soprano Briana Hunter was amazing in the role, with a large beauty of a voice that sailed over the orchestra. She was also genuinely funny and offered a jolt of energy every time she was onstage.

The other major character, Boy, is an obnoxious, lovesick teenager whose role could have been easily cut in the translation from play to opera, but he was performed with endearing charm by tenor Chad Somers.

At first, there seemed to be a serious disconnect between the interesting things going on in the orchestra pit and the rather dull, declamatory singing onstage. About 30 minutes in, the orchestra and vocal lines finally meshed during a tender scene where Logger braided Vera's tangled hair while filling her in on the local info ("It's Indians who are treated like colored folk around here"). Bass-baritone Kenneth Kellogg matched Briana Hunter in vocal power and acting chops, and their scenes together were a delight.

Though the mixture of realism and myth didn't quite work for me, the multi-racial Northern California story created by Eisa Davis was consistently fascinating, and Stookey's music both ambitious and accomplished. There are two more performances: Sunday the 11th at 3PM and Thursday the 15th at 8PM. Click here for tickets.