Midtown Opera Festival – Memphis Flyer

Ziggy Mack

Stephanie Doche (left) and Chelsea Miller

When America has gone to war, there typically has been a national sense of purpose and involvement. Even if the engagement was controversial, as with Vietnam, there was passion. Today’s drawn-out wars seem to inspire little more than a collective shrug. It surely is a combination of several factors. The nation is not exhorted to buy war bonds, or save metals, or send books to our warriors. The casualty count has been relatively low and our troops are superbly trained and capable, so there’s little national sense of urgency. The enemy is amorphous, and so is our patriotic rage. And there are a comparatively smaller number of troops involved — how many people do you know that are in a combat zone?

But our soldiers still die, get wounded, are permanently injured, go insane, commit suicide.

On occasion, there are efforts to break through the apathy and remind us of the profound seriousness, efforts, and sacrifices of those who wear the uniform. One such is a superb work being staged by Opera Memphis during its Mid-Town Opera Festival, which began last weekend and concludes this weekend.

The Falling and the Rising is a sublime opera that distills the complexity of our wars into vivid portraits of the women and men who continue to fight them. It is a beautiful work, deep but not heavy, a one-act that packs in a lot.

The libretto is by Memphian Jerre Dye, now a Chicagoan, but Memphis lays its claim to his remarkable talent as an actor, writer, and teacher. I daresay there aren’t many operas that have passages such as: “A parachute that’s poorly packed ain’t really worth a pile of shit.” And “I’m a grown-ass women.” Along with references to propofol and midazolam. But Dye’s verbal forays pack an indelible punch in telling the story of a soldier who is seriously injured when a roadside IED goes off. The military doctors induce a coma to help the chances of her recovery. The liminal dream space she inhabits brings her face to face with others who are serving or who have served, and the telling of their stories elevates the understanding of the soldier as well as the audience.

Zach Redler is the composer and deftly brings together various influences to beautifully express the story. The text is paramount, he says, as he speaks of what supports it: bluegrass, of black gospel music, Debussy’s Clair de Lune, and dollops of Sondheim. It is tonal with leitmotifs for the distinct characters that further sharpen their definition.

And the characters are beautifully rendered in the libretto and performed with remarkable power and grace by the singers. The Soldier is Chelsea Miller, former artist-in-residence at Opera Memphis, and possessed of an expressive soprano voice.

Mezzo-soprano Stephanie Doche is explosively eloquent as Toledo, the tough-as-nails “grown-ass woman” who reveals her past to the Army psychiatrist. As the parachute instructor Jumper, the popular tenor Philip Himebook brings a mix of kindness and swagger to the role. Darren Stokes, a bass-baritone, sings the part of the Colonel, grieving over the loss of his wife in action with exquisitely rendered restraint and feeling. The final character to appear in the Soldier’s dreams is the Homecoming Soldier sung by Marcus King with elements of rage, sardonic wit, humility, and reluctant acceptance, expressed at his hometown church where he keeps himself in check because his mother is there. But you can’t miss how he seethes, copes, and shares his wheelchair-bound fate as he embarks on this new life he never chose.

The Dye-Redler opera would have been complete with the original finale, but director Ned Canty, general manager of Opera Memphis, added a genius touch. He enlisted 24 veterans and active duty military men and women to be the chorus of the opera. When the five principal singers were bringing the performance to a close, it was already emotional, but then, as the two dozen chorus members walked slowly out joining in — some in dress uniform, some in POW T-shirts, some in fatigues — it became larger, deeper, something of a higher mystery and resolution. And an ideal conclusion to a brilliant performance.

The Falling and the Rising performs April 12th and 13th at 7:30 p.m. with members of the Memphis Symphony Orchestra playing. Tickets: www.operamemphis.org/tickets or call 257-3100.

Librettist-playwright-performer-director-teacher Jerre Dye’s current project — not his latest, since Dye’s always working well into the future — is being staged over the next couple of weekends at Opera Memphis’ seventh annual Midtown Opera Festival. The Falling and the Rising is a soldier’s story, both contemporary and timeless, and well suited for a modern operatic treatment. Opera Memphis general director Ned Canty, citing sacrifices large and small made by the military, says, “We need to feel them, if only for an hour or two, and that sort of empathy is what opera is best at creating.”

The story told by the opera is that of a soldier fighting overseas whose world is forever changed by an IED — improvised explosive device — that goes off while she’s on patrol. It results in a traumatic brain injury, and military doctors induce a coma to save her life. In this liminal dream space, she meets other soldiers and takes in their strength and toughness.

Jerre Dye

The genesis of the idea came from Staff Sergeant Benjamin Hilgert, a tenor in the Soldiers’ Chorus, the vocal component of the U.S. Army Field Band. He wanted to do an opera that embraced the military spirit, but it wasn’t until he connected with Dye that it began to take shape.

That meeting took place thanks to a notion Canty had a few years ago. Canty knew of Dye’s abilities and arranged for a commission of “Ghosts of Crosstown,” four short opera works with music from different composers. They were first performed in 2014 as part of the second annual Midtown Opera Festival and staged on the loading dock of the old Sears building as well as at Playhouse on the Square.

“Those short pieces acted like calling cards,” Dye says, “because they were mined from true stories.” One of those subsequent performances was at an Opera America conference that Hilgert had attended. “Ben saw the piece and said, ‘I want to talk to that guy,'” Dye says. “He asked me, ‘Would you be interested in writing a short piece for us?’ And I was like, ‘Of course I would.'”

The third member of the creative collaboration is composer Zach Redler, who Dye had worked with on one of the Crosstown pieces.

That 10- or 15-minute piece turned into a full-length chamber piece as interest developed and various organizations supported it with joint commissions. The U.S. Army Field Band was also involved in the commissioning along with Opera Memphis, Arizona Opera, San Diego Opera, Seattle Opera, and Texas Christian University.

Developing the story was a particularly affecting process for all involved. It evolved from interviews that Dye, Hilgert, and Redler did with dozens of soldiers and veterans at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and elsewhere.

The first interview on the first day was a soldier named Tyler, who was recovering from a traumatic brain injury. He’d been in a coma for a long time and “was eager to talk about what that experience was like,” Dye says. “And what it was like to come out, what recovery looks like, and he talked about it in some beautiful, subtle ways.”

That quickly convinced the collaborators to tell not about an injury but about what happens in a coma, what the brain is thinking about and what kind of information is being processed. And it allowed them to put several voices in the story.

But there was a particular revelation that came only when the interview was over. “I ran out of questions at the end of the interview,” Dye says, “and I ignorantly and clumsily said to Tyler, ‘So, what’s next for you?’ And there was a little bit of silence and he looked at me with the most amazing soulful eyes and said, ‘There’s nothing else. There is just this. There is just right here and right now.’ Yeah. After I wiped the tears from my eyes, I just went, ‘Okay, there’s my Zen message for the day. And that’s an aria.'”

The Falling and the Rising performs April 6th, 12th, and 13th at 7:30 p.m. with members of the Memphis Symphony Orchestra playing. Tickets: www.operamemphis.org/tickets or call 257-3100.