Perera: The Yellow Wallpaper. - - Manhattan School of Music, New York, New York - opera reviews

Commonweal, Feb 12, 1993 by Gerald Weales

At a seminar before the first of three performances of The Yellow Wallpaper given last December at the Manhattan School of Music, Ronald Perera (music) and Constance Congdon (libretto) explained the strategies they used in making an opera of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman story, which has become a staple of American literature anthologies and courses since the growing interest in women writers has altered the canon in so many colleges. At one point, Congdon said that working on the piece had been fascinating and advised "any playwrights in the audience" to consider writing a libretto themselves. One playwright who was not in the audience had already done that. The night after I saw The Yellow Wallpaper, I saw Orpheus in Love at the Circle Rep; Craig Lucas had done the libretto to Gerald Busby's music.

The narrator/protagonist of Gilman's turn-of-the-century story is a woman suffering from what she calls a "temporary nervous depression--a slight hysterical tendency" and a comic character in the opera called "Neur--as--then--i--a." Her doctor-husband has put her on a regimen devised by the celebrated nerve specialist S. Weir Mitchell (as was Gilman until, unlike her heroine, she escaped). Mitchell is mentioned in the story and appears as a lecturer on the edge of the action in the opera. The protagonist is to rest, exercise, eat heartily, take tonics, but she is to avoid any kind of excitement, which means no work, minimal conversation, no writing (the story is what she has written in her secret notebook). At first appalled by the ugly wallpaper, she becomes obsessed with it, tries to follow the pattern, and comes to see that the pattern behind the pattern is a woman (or a group of women) trapped by the exterior design. At the end, she has ripped the wallpaper from the walls to free the woman--to escape because she sees herself as the woman-- and is creeping around and around the edges of the room, having been driven mad by her husband's loving but oppressive cure.

To get the precise feel of the Gilman story, a dramatic piece would have to be a solo performance, like Sorry, Wrong Number or The Human Voice; there has apparently been such a musical piece although I have not seen it. Congdon, however, working with Perera and director Mark Harrison, chose to go outside the room, to create a world beyond the character's isolation, if only to heighten it. Pulling away from the festivities of a Fourth of July picnic, Charlotte (Congdon has given Gilman's name to the unnamed protagonist of the story) sings, "I'm in a room wherever I am./I'm in a room wherever I go." She feels much closer to the women in the wallpaper (the women's chorus), particularly to her other self who often moves in sync with her. The characters---even her husband John and his sister Jennie-- are largely stereotypes, but they are used either to dramatize her situation (the restraints John and Jennie put on her) or--in the case of the nursemaid, the handymen, the realtor and his daughters--to contrast the presumably ordinary world with her distressed one. Many of the apparently casual lines that these characters speak have deeper resonance, at least in retrospect. In the first scene, the busybody of a realtor, intent on pleasing his renters, keeps saying, "We can do that for you," a line that grates in the memory as soon as we realize that Charlotte is invalided by not being free to do for herself.

The split perspective in the opera means that it never achieves the intensity of the last horrifying scene in the story. The events are there, but the force is lost. Partly that is intentional or, as Congdon suggested in the seminar, a happy accident of having introduced the two little girls. In the picnic scene, at their father's insistence, they sing a song about a little hen who "washed up the dishes,/And kept the house clean," a school-house vision of the role of women. In the last scene, as Charlotte is led out, they sing a secret song, snatches of which they have sung before, about a little girl who would not obey, who would only please herself, and who "flew very high, very high, very high." This promise that women would not always be trapped in yellow wallpaper is underlined by the fact that Congdon has moved Gilman's 1892 story to 1899. A new century, a new beginning. Well, maybe; the last image is of the startled nurse staring in confusion at the notebook Charlotte left behind.

There is something particularly attractive about opening an opera with a trio---a bass and two bassoons. So Orpheus in Love begins. The bassoonists accompany this contemporary Orpheus as he tosses and turns in his bed trying to fall asleep. The first act is very funny, musically and verbally, but physically as well; this stage business may come from director Kirsten Sanderson for there is no hint of it in the printed text (Bomb, Spring, 1992). At one point three-fourths of a string quartet share his bed; the double bass is too big to invade the human bass's territory. In comic sequences, we meet his father and his first piano teacher, both dead, and his Eurydice, a reluctant student of the viola. The second act turns somewhat more serious as the bass woos, wins, and loses his soprano (the nameless characters are identified in the program only by voice or instrument) and rescues her from hell only to lose her again. Finally, standing with the dead, she returns him to his music. End on the replenishing sound of the viola.