Long Beach Opera, southern California's maverick opera company, recently further enhanced its reputation with a bold and imaginative production of The Difficulty of Crossing a Field, a new work by composer David Lang and librettist Mac Wellman. Inspired by Ambrose Bierce's 1888 short story, the work, a cross between opera and musical drama, tells the story of Mr. Williamson (actor Mark Bringelson), a plantation owner in the pre-Civil War south, who takes a walk in full view of his family, friends and slaves and disappears from sight, never to be seen again.
In "Rashomon"-like fashion, various witnesses to this strange, mysterious event offer their conflicting explanations as to what happened. Who is telling the truth? Who has something to hide? Who has something to gain from Williamson's death?
Answers don't come easily in Field. Both Lang and Wellman favor ambiguity and minimalism, leaving it up to the audience to answer the big questions for itself. What does come through clearly, though, is the sinister nature of the antebellum south, with its inbred racism, feudalistic power structure and warped human values.
Director and production designer Andreas Mitisek (LBO's artistic director) have created a perfectly skewed setting for the production, placing the audience on stage, looking out at the deep, dark space of the auditorium. The action takes place in an atmospheric setting of smokiness and alienation, with the Lyris String Quartet (conducted by Benjamin Makio) playing off in the distance and the performers widely separated from each other. Mrs Wlliamson (the powerful singer Suzan Hanson) sits high up on a ladder, a long skirt draped around her. Her distraught, slightly mad daughter (the equally thrilling Valerie Vinzant), lies far away on a mattress, singing mostly to herself.
The plantation's slaves, led by the non-singing Eric B. Anthony as Boy Sam (the "house Negro"), backed by an eight-person ensemble (the field workers), don't lament Mr. Williamson's disappearance the way the white folks do; they merely see it as the result of a psychic event, a familiar act of voodoo or witchcraft.
Lang's score matches the elliptical style of the text: one phrase doesn't necessarily lead to another; voices and instruments suddenly trail off, repeat, only to break off again.
The Difficulty of Crossing a Field probes the mystery of life and death in a challenging and provocative way, managing at the same time to be deeply felt and moving. It's an astonishing work of art.
