Reviews NYCOpera Published 13 January 2025

Review: Eat the Document at HERE Arts Center

HERE Arts Center ⋄ January 9-17, 2025

Prototype presents a modern opera based on a novel that takes its name from a documentary: Loren Noveck finds it intriguingly complex.

Loren Noveck
Paul Pinto, Tim Russell, Danielle Buonaiuto, and Amy Justman in Eat the Document. Photo: Maria Baranova

Paul Pinto, Tim Russell, Danielle Buonaiuto, and Amy Justman in Eat the Document. Photo: Maria Baranova

It might seem like opera—an art form that can feel impenetrably highbrow to a novice, inextricably tied to classical music—would be a counterintuitive medium through which to tell a story thoroughly of the twentieth century, to compare the early 1970s to the late 1990s, or to look at the political activism and personalities and history and pop culture of eras saturated with music of their own. It might also seem like opera is an odd way to approach the work of the incisively postmodern novelist Dana Spiotta, whose pages bristle with artifacts real and fictional that speak of the twenty-first-century world. And yet what composer John Glover, librettist Kelley Rourke, and director Kristin Marting have created in Eat the Document, a new opera based on the 2006 novel of the same title by Spiotta, itself named after a 1972 documentary about Bob Dylan’s 1966 UK tour, is nothing if not sharply modern, urgently political. “How do we exist within a broken system? What obligation—and what power—does any individual have to confront and change systems that lead to suffering?” ask the creators in a program note, and the show they’ve created poses multiple different approaches to those questions.

The voices (under Mila Henry’s music direction) have the purity and vocal range that we expect of opera singers; Glover’s music is rich in motif and drama, and fascinatingly orchestrated for an ensemble of mostly strings. And at the same time, Glover’s music draws on various idioms of contemporary pop (more on that later), and Rourke’s modern-language English libretto speaks straight to the present and to the characters’ political concerns: the destruction of the Vietnam war, the limits and tragedies of activism, the omnipresent seduction of selling out. (Marting and Henry keep the performances so crisply sung that although the venue provides supertitles, I’m not sure they’re necessary.) To condense a novel into a 90-minute performance will inevitably involve compromise, and Eat the Document doesn’t entirely escape opera’s tendency to think in archetype; the plot and characters are sometimes only lightly sketched, but Eat the Document remains thought-provoking and effective.

Nesting the classical connotations of opera inside the story’s two twentieth-century settings, and then all of inside the vantage points of both the novel’s 2006 and the opera’s 2025, the creators produce a kind of cascading sequence of cause and effect, of idealistic goal and tragic or bitterly ironic outcome. Over and over we see intention devolve into violence or evaporate into ineffectiveness; we feel the inexorable weight of capitalism and war and refusal to acknowledge the outcomes of one’s actions. Some of the narrative strands peter out, but in one key plot development, after nearly thirty years of living as a fugitive, a onetime radical is able to look her son in the eye and have an honest conversation about what she’s done.

We begin in 1972, when war is raging (the resonant bass of Paul Chwe Min-Chi An is used throughout as a kind of melodic thread of doom, constantly pulling us back to the atrocities of Vietnam). Young lovers/revolutionaries Mary (Danielle Buonaiuto) and Bobby (Tim Russell) plan an action—bombing what should be the vacant summer home of a munitions maker—but it goes wrong and someone dies. They separate to go underground, planning to meet up in a year—but almost thirty years later, they’ve both lived multiple fake identities, and they’ve moved on with their lives in different ways. Mary becomes Caroline and Louise (now played by Amy Justman); she’s got a seventeen-year-old son (also played by Russell) who knows nothing about her past, and she works kitchen jobs where she can remain fairly anonymous, anesthetizing herself with alcohol against her tenuous life.

Bobby becomes Nash (Paul Pinto), and continues to gravitate toward activism, running a bookstore in the Pacific Northwest where a current generation of activists hangs out planning flash mobs, digital pranks, and protests, constantly fighting the temptation to sell out, and often losing. One of them, Miranda (also played by Buoniauto), tries a tentative romance with Nash, then instead ends up dating hacktivist Josh (Michael Kuhn), until he totally sells out to corporate America. The activists—also including Natalie Trumm’s Sissy–get some of the best songs, but they pay for that with weaker character developments and plot. The 1990s songs and the argument they limn about the limits of activism are key, but I could have dispensed with the not-fleshed-out romance between Miranda and Nash entirely in the service of giving Jason’s investigation of Louise more room to play out. (Or giving Louise in particular more room to play out; she remains a cipher throughout, and the one piece of double casting that didn’t work for me Justman showing up as a member of the bookstore collective. I was sometimes uncertain that it was a different person and not Louise in some sort of incognito return to her roots.)

As a production, it’s stunning. The work done by Marting and the design team creates a built environment so rich with detail that the narrative can’t even fully make use of it; I wished I could have an hour on Peiyi Wong’s set to take in all the small details of the space and Oscar Escobedo’s props: all the album covers of Jason’s record collection, all the books that populate the shelves, the anarchist commodities being sold at the “retail experience” where one late scene is set.

Marting’s direction of the ensemble creates the real impression of a crowd from a cast of eight, with the mostly multiply cast performers doing sharp character work in small sketches: An suddenly shifting from his scarily damaged men to play the musician Dennis Wilson with a serene lightness. Tim Russell’s Jason suddenly coming to life with the mystery of his mother to solve. Danielle Buoniauto’s tentative Caroline, trying to figure out who to become.

And the cleverest effects in the creation of the show come when it most fully theatricalizes the story. The program note talks about trying to fold the idiomatic music of the book and the era into the opera, which is done extraordinarily successfully (opera neophyte me noticed it without the note, I swear)—you can hear lush 70s pop and riot grrl post-punk in the score, alongside moments of discordance that call to mind some of moder classical’s spiker moments. And the combination of a rock ‘n’ roll drummer with piano and a string ensemble gives the score a unique quality.

One thing the stage can do with extraordinary effectiveness—something much harder for a novel—is to let the two times and place slide together and interpenetrate in time and space. Not only can we have Bobby/Nash and Mary/Louise onstage together, the use of double casting creates intricate ripples between the two timelines. Bobby isn’t Jason’s father, but having the same actor play both shows the way in which Louise’s child is formed by that former relationship. Mary/Caroline has no connection to Miranda, but Nash’s reluctance to get involved with Miranda somehow mirrors all of his regrets about Mary, too. Marting, Glover, and Rourke ultimately succeed in creating a haunting final scene where past meets present, where people must face the ghosts of their own former actions and try to atone for them.


Loren Noveck

Loren Noveck is a writer, editor, dramaturg, and recovering Off-Off-Broadway producer, who was for many years the literary manager of Six Figures Theatre Company. She has written for The Brooklyn Rail, The Brooklyn Paper nytheatre.com, and NYTheater now, and currently writes occasionally for HowlRound and WIT Online. In her non-theatrical life, she works in book publishing.

Review: Eat the Document at HERE Arts Center Show Info


Produced by Prototype / HERE Arts Center

Directed by Kristin Marting; music director: Mila Henry

Written by Kelley Rourke, based on the novel by Dana Spiotta

Scenic Design Peiyi Wong; props: Oscar Escobedo

Costume Design Rashidah Nelson

Lighting Design Ayumu “Poe” Saegusa

Sound Design Kenny Feldman

Cast includes Paul Chwe MinChul An, Danielle Buonaiuto, Adrienne Danrich, Amy Justman, Michael Kuhn, Paul Pinto, Tim Russell, Natalie Trumm

Original Music John Glover

Link
Show Details & Tickets

Running Time 90 minutes


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