The company of Oratorio for Living Things. Photo: Ben Arons

I confess, the word “oratorio” put me off Oratorio for Living Things when it premiered a few years back. (I mean, Covid too; both its planned 2020 premiere and its actual 2022 run were disrupted badly.) But I couldn’t quite wrap my brain around the idea of a “religious-adjacent musical service on a subject or theme the composer has decided is ‘holy’”–as a program note defines the form–as something that made sense to see live in the theater.

Three years and one MacArthur Genius grant for creator Heather Christian later, it is perhaps stunningly obvious that I was wrong. In an increasingly atomized, digitized world where so much of our time is spent alone in front of screens, the simple act of showing up to a live performance can feel like a ritual; shared, focused time in a room with strangers can become tinged with the sacred, even in the absence of a specific connection to a god or gods. Oratorio for Living Things roots itself deeply in that idea, and builds an experience whose form and content fuse to anchor us in the shared reality of the performance. 

The holy subject here is time, and Christian builds her show–a 90-minute composition for twelve choir members, sung through except for one section of spoken dialogue near the end–into a container of that sacramental material: the time we spend watching the show is materially relevant to its theme. Or, more accurately, the time we spend surrounded by the show. There is a central playing space at the bottom of the arena-style, steeply tiered seats that comprise much of Krit Robinson’s environmental design of the theater, but much of the time, director Lee Sunday Evans has the performers sing while seated or standing in the diagonal aisles that run up to the four corners or from a gallery that runs behind the top row of audience. (In a program note, Evans calls the show’s location “a spiritual space with no pulpit”–no central focal point.) It’s entirely non-technological surround sound, and the acoustics (both in the way the singing is orchestrated, braided, and miked, and in Nick Kourtides’s sound design) are such that you’ll hear entirely different parts of the libretto depending on where you’re sitting. (And what you do hear, you may only cleanly understand in patches–a lot of it is in Latin, and there’s poetry in a lot of the English that I only grasped later by being able to look at the libretto.) Still, the audience is immersed in the physicality of the show, forced to be aware of one another as we listen and watch.

The piece breaks roughly into three acts, representing time on three scales—the quantum (the microscopic, the cellular), the human (memory and individual human stories), and the cosmic (the generative elemental violence that moves the universe). As a sort of anchor to the middle section sits an accounting of human time: a breakdown of the micro-increments of activity that fill our days. Its location in the middle will become significant later, when the play locates itself and us in the “middle” of time on its cosmic scale. As the beginning and middle sections break down the ways we spend individual time, the end breaks the sweep of cosmic time down into the micro-increments represented by human activity in any shape or form. 

Part of what conveys the sacred quality of Oratorio is how very difficult it is to describe: I can’t tell you which performer sang what, only that their vocal range and variation was remarkable, across an assortment of pristinely clear voices with strikingly different qualities. All of the design elements are subtle, but build the effect: Márion Talán de la Rosa’s costumes, shades of muted blue and gray with subtle patterns and little pops of red in accessories. The rock-shaped chandelier that’s both the brightest light in Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew’s design for much of the show and a key feature of the set. Much of the show takes place almost in darkness, but with hints of saturated color in the light. 

I can’t even tell you that I would have understood the thematics as they were happening without the program note, and I would have had a different experience in a different seat. But I still felt the build of the music happening around me, the ways it braided and cycled to recall the DNA helix or the input-outputs of a breathing ecosystem. Christian calls the piece “musically dangerous” because of the way it’s performed without a single conductor, and in the way the performers move and place themselves in patterns in the space, you feel a harmony that’s coming from them, not a central authority. I felt the self-similarity at different scales that reminds me of (what little I know about) fractals, especially at the end when the choir members address us in plain speech and the shape of the piece, the shape of the space, and the shape of time all overlay at once.

My companion mentioned that she would have welcomed opera-style supertitles at certain points, and while I think that would have changed the experience, I will say that I got a lot out of the libretto that I did not grasp in the room. The language is lusher on the page, and pairs the musicality of the Latin with the poetry in its translation and in Christian’s lyrics. The middle section includes stories that Christian calls her “memory harvest,” personal stories left as anonymous voice messages, and the precision of the storytelling in them is more visible on the page, using diction as punctuation a la Anna Deavere Smith; the lyrics Christian has written here.

At the end of Oratorio for Living Things,I found myself wishing I could see it outside, with the night sky as counterpoint to its third act musing on the cosmos. Anyone want to join me in pitching to the programmers for the amphitheater at Little Island?