The Brooklyn Rail

There’s always something clarifying about walking into a venue that’s hosting a Robert Ashley opera. At a mainstream place like the Metropolitan Opera, it’s common for the audience to applaud the sets as the curtain goes up. At this premiere night for a new production of Ashley’s Foreign Experiences, the stage holds seven desks, each fronted by a piece of corrugated metal. Hanging at the back are some large sheets of metal, with a small window set high into one. The feeling is a bare room at night, a space for an isolated figure alone with their thoughts. There’s nothing left but the mind of madness.

This stage design from David Moodey follows that from Jacqueline Humbert for the original 1994 premiere. There’s more continuity in that Tom Hamilton is at the back, handling the live mix as music director, and Mimi Johnson of Lovely Music and Performing Artservices, Inc. produces. Both have been instrumental in maintaining Ashley’s work and preparing the “new band” on stage: Gelsey Bell, Kayleigh Butcher, Bonnie Lander, Brian Mc Corkle, Paul Pinto, Dave Ruder, Aliza Simons. That’s the slightly shifting ensemble that has taken over from Ashley’s first group of performers and has been both premiering and reviving his work over the past ten years.

The seven performers each sit at a desk and deliver Ashley’s story. Foreign Experiences is the last part of a four-opera sequence with the overall title Now Eleanor’s Idea, and features the two main characters from the first opera, Improvement (Don Leaves Linda) (in the middle are eL/Aficionado and Now Eleanor’s Idea). The focus here is on Don, who heads from the Midwest to a job at a small California college, where his life falls apart. Don blames this, his unraveling, on a ghost that began haunting him on his arrival, and he ends up on a journey that is part mystical quest and part conspiracist fugue state.

As odd and unpromising as that may look on paper, change California to anyplace in Europe and trade Don’s car for a horse carriage, and you’ve got a solid basis for a nineteenth century opera. And if the internal turmoil of any “Don” in any romantic era opera compelled them to sing their thoughts aloud, so does Ashley’s murmuring bed of music and rigorously metered text press out from the characters as a mix of intoned, musically phrased speech that rises into singing, depending on the expressive beauty or intensity of the words.

And those words… Ashley was one of the finest prose writers in American literature, his stream-of-consciousness monologues mixing present narration with digressions into personal memories and cultural experiences and opinions. Don goes to his office but keeps getting lost; he can’t remember what floor it’s on; he has to overcome his fear of the ghost to grab his usual rations of vodka, vegetables, and a loaf of bread; he expounds on Immanuel Velikovsky and oral sex in British literature; he argues with Linda; he begins to believe he has premonitions and is part of a government experiment; and in the end, he meets his searched-for guru, “the man.” That is where the story ends, “the man” lecturing on private property, commercialism, banks, and communitarianism, Pinto ramping up the intensity of his delivery to near-breaking against the implacable chorus underneath him. The last words serve both the character and the performers: “thank you.”

That this is all mesmerizing, comprehensible, and emotionally powerful is a tribute both to Ashley’s genius and the skill of these performers. The story insinuates its way in through the enticing psychoacoustic mix of ambient sound, graceful voices, and the relaxed exactitude of the ensemble. Compared to the recording on Lovely Music (chances to see Ashley performances are few and far between and should be jumped on), the new ensemble is slightly understated but also subtly swinging. Bell and Pinto are tremendously charismatic performers, both with a balance of seriousness and wryness, and they’re gripping in this production. Everyone manages the difficult feat of both combining as multiple voices into one character, and portraying multiple characters through their individual performances.

As unique as Ashley’s method is, it’s also deeply organic, rooted in speech—imagine a charismatic stranger bending your ear to spin out the strangest but most compelling thing you’ve ever heard, and that’s the experience. Two or three minutes immersion at the start, and the ear and sensibilities adapt. Even with the story essentially in media res of a larger narrative, the drama of how Don gets from one place to another far distant, especially in his mind, is wrenching, a mix of Ralph Ellison, Don DeLillo, and Martin Scorsese.

Foreign Experiences comes at the end of Don and Linda’s story, and they themselves first appear in Perfect Lives, probably Ashley’s best-known work and the one that, during his lifetime, was fully realized as the television opera that was the height of his ambitions. The four operas make a story that’s in dialogue with things like John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy, updated for the even greater loss of illusions after the Vietnam War, the political assassinations of the sixties, the Manson Family murders and the febrile, brittle mix of hedonism and paranoia of the seventies. Ashley puts his characters on quests to the West—he calls California “the end of the Earth”—and spiritual, twice-removed allegories from Christian mysticism and Carlos Castañeda, professional sports, TV action shows, and corporate buzzwords. What they live through, and see around them, is loneliness, violence, and madness—nothing less than the history of American westward expansion, via the near-ASMR seductions of a master storyteller.