The
Opera Insider caught up with Ken Cazan, who returns to direct this summer's triple bill of one-act operas:
Gianni Schicchi,
The Breasts of Tiresias and
The Seven Deadly Sins.
During this summer
season you will be directing three one-act operas; do you think the rehearsal
period will be long enough?
Lord,no! This is a thrilling and terrifying job! I have no doubt we will get it all
done and in some style given the cast and designers involved. I plan to sleep
for a month afterwards! Each piece is so unique that I truly relish the
opportunity to try to tie them together on some level, to try to find a
common physical language that can be a thru-line for the three pieces. And
it has always been my experience that in working with "the little company
that could," you can accomplish anything you put your mind and heart to
(thank you for that, Pat)
[Pat Pearce
– General and Artistic Director of Central City Opera]. That is the joy of
being isolated on a mountain top for four weeks with nothing to distract you
from the artistic challenges at hand.
How do you prepare
and how do you keep each opera clear in your mind?
The
greatest challenge with these three pieces is the language diversity and
the drastically different nature of each piece: the broad, music hall comedy of
Schicchi vs. the stark, alienation
theatre of
7DSs (as we are referring
to
The Seven Deadly Sins) vs. the
genuine absurdism and surrealism of
Mamelles
[The Breasts of Tiresias]. To tie
that all together into one hopefully semi-cohesive evening of theatre that
says something to an audience is a unique challenge. As for learning them,
one simply studies and studies and studies. Fortunately, I teach at a
major university and have access to a rehearsal space on a fairly regular basis
and am in there pretty regularly playing with different ideas for the
choreography for
7DSs.
Can you give us a
taste for how these operas will work together?
The
main theme of the operas is "home and one's place in that home." We
have chosen to set the pieces in the period that
Mamelles was written, 1947-early 1950s, post-WWII. Dadaism had
reached its peak as an art form and with the beginning of the recovery of
Europe from the devastation of WWII; people had become machines, working
ridiculous hours to rebuild their lives and to restore some semblance of
normalcy. The Dadaists used endless imagery of peoples' bodies with machines
for heads and limbs and torsos. We construct an actual house on stage as the
evening progresses.
First,
in
Schicchi, the family is desperate
to recover some of their former glory but opportunists like Gianni Schicchi
simply have better survival skills and outsmart them. The house begins to come
together.
Then
in
7DSs, the two Annas sell
everything they can, including their bodies, to work to build a home for their
rather lazy, judgmental family in rural Louisiana, the little tract home
so popular after WWII. The Annas literally become furniture for the family to
walk over and sit on and abuse. The house is even more complete.
Finally,
in
Mamelles, a society that has
experienced the devastation of war first-hand cries out to have more children,
to repopulate. What is a woman's place in this society? What is a husband's
place in this society? Everyone is working so hard to rebuild their lives, that
they have lost their humanity and become the cafe table they are waiting on,
the messengers become their bicycle, the idea of babies being created in test
tubes is given full-throttle exposure in this piece. There is a loss of
humanity and people have become the things they covet.
This
is the thrust of the Dadaist message and Cameron Anderson, our set designer,
and Alice Bristow, our costume designer, have brilliantly recreated the
Dadaist style. The house onstage is finally completed when husband and wife in
Mamelles agree that it takes both
of them to conceive and produce a child. I wish there was a fourth opera in
this cycle that moved us forward and challenged the classic notion of
"husband and wife" as the ultimate family, a hot burner issue for the
world today and for me personally, as a gay man. But that's for another
summer....
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Set
renderings for Central City Opera’s 2011 productions of Gianni Schicchi (above) and The
Breasts of Tiresias (below) by designer Cameron Anderson.
|
After an accident
that ended the dancing portion of your career, your roommate, a vocal
coach, asked you to give his singers dramatic training because they were not
required to take acting courses. Do you find that singers are receiving
this training these days, and what are some basic acting principles you impart
to young singers?
I do believe that singers are receiving better acting
training. People like Chuck Hudson, Ann Baltz, and Stephen Wadsworth are
training people in a more realistic approach to performing opera. I teach at
the University of Southern California Flora Thornton School of Music and I
stress a realistic approach to acting. I was trained by members of the Actors
Studio at Syracuse University and they stressed an extremely organic
approach to performing.
Now,
opera is of its very nature an over-the-top art form, heightened dramatically
by the spectacular music used to express emotion. Consequently, one often has
to stretch the limits of reality to a certain extent. That, to my mind,
simply heightens the visceral and sensorial thrill of opera. There is a certain
ecstasy that can be achieved when all of the stars align and a performance is
absolutely in the groove and the audience gets swept up in that. I also
heartily believe that ALL singer actors should take movement and dance classes!
One has to understand how their body works and be able to adapt to any physical
challenge onstage. We do two to three dance classes a year during the acting
classes at USC. I wish there was time in the schedule to do more.
What has been your
favorite opera to direct? What was one thing about the production that
made it work?
I get asked this question all of the time and
it is literally impossible to answer. There have been several favorite
productions for me and not all were operas. Near the top would be
Waiting for Godot with the Milwaukee
Chamber Theatre many years ago. A brilliant cast, a five week rehearsal period,
digging for the truth in the absurdity: it all came together for a devastating
evening.
Salome in Santa Fe in the
mid-'90s was a thrill, primarily thanks to the late and truly great Inga
Nielsen. She was an amazing colleague and anything I asked her to try,
she did. Last summer's
Three
Decembers here in Central City was a tremendously fulfilling
experience. Joyce
[Castle],
Emily
[Pulley], and Keith
[Phares] were amazing and the
rehearsal period was much more like doing a play thanks to
[music director] John Baril's dedication to the drama. Then there
were
Dialogues of the Carmelites
and
Gloriana at CCO which were great
not only for my career but also for the opportunity to work with Joyce
Castle so intimately.
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Central City Opera’s
THREE DECEMBERS (2010). Pictured (L to R): Emily Pulley (Beatrice), Joyce
Castle (Madeline) and Keith Phares (Charlie). Photo by Mark Kiryluk.
|
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Central City Opera’s GLORIANA
(2001). Pictured (L to R): Joyce Castle (Queen Elizabeth I). Photo by Mark
Kiryluk.
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Last year, I had the
honor to direct the West Coast premiere of Wagner's
Das Liebesverbot at USC. Who would have believed that students
could pull of Wagner with such artistry, integrity, and guts? I don't think I
have ever been so proud of a cast. I would have to say the number one on
my list is
Death in Venice which I
had the privilege of doing for Chicago Opera Theatre. The elegance and
simplicity of the designs, Danny Pelzig's
[director
and choreographer of Central City Opera’s Carmen
this summer] brilliant choreography, and Robin Leggate's
other-worldly performance as Ascenbach made an evening that, when the final
blackout happened long after the music had died, created a silence that
thrilled all of us on the production team. The response from everyone was
overwhelming. For once, I felt that maybe we had fulfilled a bit of what Britten
was looking for in the piece. I know that that sounds tremendously egotistical
but those moments are few and far between in our careers and when they
do very rarely happen, you savor it.
You are one of America’s most sought-after
directors and have directed more than 140 productions for more than 40
companies; what have been your greatest achievements and what are the reasons
for your successes?
I think the above answer addresses a lot of that. Success to me means working
regularly and steadily in a very fickle business. I will say that the
primary reason for any success I may have achieved is that I have an
insane and wonderful family who constantly challenge and inspire me and
encourage my life in the arts. The other thing that keeps me going is that I
have never shied away from a risk, theatrically. One has to hurl oneself
in to a project up to ones eyeballs. If you fail, you fail; at the least
you had a mentality and a reason for saying and doing what you did. Our job is
first to entertain but further to move, to edify, and to educate. We
in the living arts are the historians of the present and the torch bearers
of the past. We must always take a risk and stretch an audience's mentality and
emotions, whether it is tickling their funny bones or moving them to tears.
This risk-taking is the measure of any artist's success.
The article is included in the 2011 Opera Insider (Festival Resource Guide) - pdf created by Central City Opera's Education & Community Programs Department, and the interview was conducted by Deven Shaff, Coordinator of Education & Community Programs. Check out many more insider interviews and background on all of the main stage operas this summer.
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