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    Review: Kate Soper’s ‘The Hunt’ Makes the Medieval Modern

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    Kate Soper’s latest stage work freely moves between legend and anachronism for a story about three virgins taking charge of their bodies.“I was delighted to learn from this charming song all about the qualities, habits and foibles of the unicorn, or ‘monoceron,’” a character says near the start of “The Hunt,” Kate Soper’s latest work of music theater.“‘Monoceron,’” another replies, “is used to describe a real one-horned animal, whereas ‘unicornus’ is the term for the mythical creature” — only to nervously add, “I mean, I’m sure you already knew that.”It’s a quintessentially Soper moment: the language ever-so-slightly elevated, the dialogue bookish, droll and self-effacing. But “The Hunt,” which premiered on Thursday at the Miller Theater at Columbia University, is different from her other stage works.That fun fact about the proper name for a unicorn is actually one of just a few brainy asides in this show. Plot-driven and focused, and unambiguously political, “The Hunt” is more conventional — and more easily enjoyable — than Soper’s discursive, essayistic theater pieces that explore lofty questions about art and love, like “Ipsa Dixit” (2016) or “The Romance of the Rose” (remarkably, another major stage premiere of hers from this year).“The Hunt” most resembles Soper’s first music theater work, “Here Be Sirens” (2014), about three mythical sopranos passing time between encounters with doomed sailors, accompanying themselves at a piano. Now, fast-forward a bit to Middle Ages Europe, where three virgins, accompanying themselves on a violin and ukulele, have been hired by a royal court as bait for a unicorn, “whose conquest will bring riches to our kingdom, expansion of our realm, and everlasting power over all our enemies.”Each design element of the production, directed by Ashley Kelly Tata, blends medieval imagery with contemporary interjections.Rob Davidson for Miller Theatre at Columbia UniversityWhat follows is a darkly funny fairy tale — set, according to the score, in “medieval and/or contemporary times” — about their 99 days on the job: playing the part of perfect maidens, singing songs about unicorns and occasionally indulging in a filthy riddle. Think “Waiting for Godot,” but with the female rebelliousness of a Sofia Coppola film.Along the way, the three characters — sopranos, as in “Sirens” — begin to both fear and resent the king’s control over their bodies, with irony (“they said all the reading was disturbing my tranquillity”) that’s wry until it’s indignant. The only way out, to keep the unicorn from ever coming and to make a new life for themselves, is to take charge of their sexuality and, well, not be so pure anymore.In program notes, Soper admits that “The Hunt” is “the least abstract thing I’ve made,” but that it could be pulled back into abstraction — to not be “a little bit too like ‘Sex and the City’ meets Margaret Atwood” — by Ashley Kelly Tata, the director, who also staged “Ipsa Dixit.”Indeed, little of “The Hunt” suggests a literal treatment: neither Camilla Tassi’s projections that blend the aesthetic of illuminated manuscripts with selfie livestreams, nor Terese Wadden’s costumes, which evoke medieval maidenhood while revealing, under the performers’ dresses, white sneakers. Masha Tsimring’s lighting offers Brechtian distinction between dialogue and inner monologue, and Tata’s direction slowly dissolves pristine, satirized virginal presentation into something wilder, and free.Crucial to all this is Aoshuang Zhang’s scenic design. The action of Soper’s libretto unfolds in a forest clearing and a castle; but at the Miller, everything took place within a unit set of wooden panels that made up a large proscenium-filling wall. If you squinted long enough, they could be distant relatives of tree trunks. Mostly, though, the space just looks like a prison.And that’s how it feels over time for Fleur, Briar and Rue — the three virgins, who wanted this job, it emerges, to escape their different pasts, yet find themselves ambivalent about it. The room and board is nice, but after a while, the dumbly hot stable boy (a silent role played by Ian Edlund) begins to look increasingly tempting; so does any other latent desire.The show’s three performers take up folk songs adapted from historical texts by Hildegard von Bingen, Thibaut de Champagne, Christina Rossetti and more.Rob Davidson for Miller Theatre at Columbia UniversityEach performer charts this journey with charisma and persuasiveness, even if the jokes of Soper’s book don’t always land. As Rue, Hirona Amamiya matches sometimes showy, sometimes touching violin playing with petulant horniness and heart. Christiana Cole, as Briar, springs around the stage, often plucking the ukulele, with irrepressible energy and, in the end, more optimism than her fellow maidens.Brett Umlauf, who performed alongside Soper in “Sirens,” has a bright, Kristen Chenoweth-like soprano that lends itself well to Fleur’s desperate respectability and sinister sunniness. On livestreamed updates for the kingdom, she smiles through saying that she has “a good feeling” about Day 17 … and 43 … and 82. But the moment she stops recording, her face slackens into a hilarious but lonely frown familiar to anyone who has ever filmed a selfie.Together, they spin out the melodies of Soper’s score, which takes on a repetitive structure similar to the plot. (Mila Henry is the music director.) Each update from the virgins comes from the same sound world, just as each comment from the king unfurls over an electronic drone. Briar introduces deceptively straightforward folk songs, whose lyrics are pulled and adapted (sometimes even translated by Soper) from historical texts by Hildegard von Bingen, Thibaut de Champagne, Christina Rossetti and more. Entr’acte numbers step out of the action entirely for a solo ballad with a cappella backing.In the end, the work adds up to something that few would qualify as absolutely an opera or a musical, or even a play with music — but, in classic Soper fashion, none of them and all of them at once.Her finest touch in this score may be the occasional overlaying of three blocks of text for the sopranos, in which a small phrase is sung while the rest is babbled. It’s another trademark move, the kind of Soperian gesture that surfaces elsewhere in the singer-songwriter-meets-troubadour aesthetic; the carefree noodling on the instruments; the wit of a virtuosic violin solo gesture being met with the silly strum of the ukulele. Not to mention when, on a bad trip induced by sugar cubes, the virgins devolve into primitive communication, Meredith Monk-like tongue trilling that swirls in its phrasing, free of any traditional pitch or notation.That scene, though, drags on. As is often the case with Soper’s stage works, you feel, near the end, as if the score has overstated itself, that it could have benefited from a quick snip of the garden shears.What I do wish were longer is the run of “The Hunt” itself. Thursday’s premiere was one of just two performances. Not for the first time, Soper has written a show that could feasibly appeal to an Off Broadway crowd somewhere like Ars Nova. There, it could reach more people over more dates. And the more people who know about her, the better.The HuntRepeats on Saturday at the Miller Theater at Columbia University, Manhattan; millertheatre.com. More

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      Review: Ted Hearne’s ‘Farming’ Is a Sweet, Sad American Elegy

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      “Farming,” a choral work that had its New York premiere at Caramoor, is a chaotically ambitious reflection on colonization, consumption and marketing.Google search results broke my heart this weekend.Which was strange, because they didn’t include anything overtly emotional. They were lines like: “Yes, we are open. Call our consultants today.” And: “Reliable, seasonal work force.” The kind of thing you get when you look up “H-2A visa program,” which grants temporary admission to the United States for agricultural workers.But set to soulful, almost retro, doo-wop-honeyed music by Ted Hearne in “Farming,” these bland fragments seemed to touch the very core of our country: its rapacious economy, its broken immigration system, its corroded politics.Performed at Caramoor in Westchester on Sunday by the 24 vocalists of the Crossing, the precise and luminous new-music choir led by Donald Nally, it was the sweetest, saddest song.A suggestive, chaotically ambitious, often poignant reflection on colonization, consumption, marketing, entrepreneurship — you name it! — “Farming” reaches well beyond that Google search. Its quilt-like libretto encompasses 17th-century letters by William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, and 21st-century musings by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, as well as absurdist out-of-context bits from UberEats’s Twitter feed and the Farmer’s Fridge customer loyalty program. (“Green are the Farmer’s Fridge reward currency,” the singers intone with maniacal severity.)As he has in superb works like “The Source” (based on the Afghanistan war logs leaked by Chelsea Manning) and “Sound From the Bench” (which set excerpts from Supreme Court proceedings), Hearne takes these found-text nuggets and gives them music that moves from lushly meditative to frenetic and obsessively repetitive — a visceral translation into sound of the information overload that is contemporary life.The singing is sometimes pure and sometimes processed into exaggeratedly AutoTuned “Alvin and the Chipmunks” automation. On guitars, keyboards, percussion and electronics, the six instrumentalists also veer from moody industrial rock and elegiac synth drones to jittery, hypersaccharine pop. (Occasionally resting, as in “Search,” that Google section, somewhere in between.)Not quite an hour long, the nine-part “Farming” is Hearne’s latest collaboration with the Philadelphia-based Crossing, which premiered it a few weeks ago in Bucks County, Pa., and already toured it to the Netherlands before this performance at Caramoor, its first in New York. The threat of rain on Sunday forced a move inside and an adaptation of the staging and complex sound design.“Farming,” with a patchwork text that includes the words of William Penn and Jeff Bezos, was sung by the 24 vocalists of the Crossing.James Estrin/The New York TimesGiven the circumstances, the production and the sound were impressively polished. A QR code included with the program linked listeners’ phones to the libretto; accessing it also involved signing onto Caramoor’s Wi-Fi, and it seemed that many in the audience weren’t doing it.Without following the words, it would be nearly impossible to have any idea what was going on in this non-narrative but intensely text-focused work. I’m no fan of wasting paper, but this was an appropriate occasion to print out the libretto for everyone — and future iterations might want to experiment with supertitles.And Ashley Tata’s perkily surreal corporate-parody staging, which put the performers in bright orange, magenta and white uniform-type costumes, felt like a complexity too many in a piece already full of them. The attempt to tie together the work’s many thematic strands by enacting onstage what Hearne’s program note called “a new corporation, powered by quasi-religious fervor,” was confusing — though maybe things were clearer in the original, outdoor conception.While this piece is less scattered than Hearne’s most recent major work, “Place,” a deeply personal reflection on gentrification, “Farming,” too, feels like a grab bag into which there’s always assumed to be room for yet one more idea. The central pairing of Penn and Bezos, the two pioneers — their vast differences, their essential similarities — would probably have been a more than sufficient subject here.The Penn quotations conjure some of the fundamental, irreconcilable tension of our country’s founding: his efforts to maintain good relations with the Indigenous population, on the one hand, and the commercial interests he wanted to expand, on the other.To what extent are Bezos’s manipulative doublespeak and high-minded invocations of empowerment through selling a break with Penn’s colonial promises? To what degree are they merely a continuation of what were sour lies to begin with?These are the kind of huge, unanswerable questions that Hearne’s works have presented so enigmatically yet powerfully over the past decade, fired by his passionate, resourceful music. I found other parts here — the Farmer’s Fridge, the Twitter fragments, the staging — a distraction from that burning central point.Yet I would have hated to lose “Search.” And Hearne’s earnest too-muchness, his eagerness to stuff as much as possible into each piece, has become such a central feature of his artistry that it’s hard to think of it as a weakness. It’s who he is.‘Farming’Performed on Sunday at Caramoor. More

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      ‘Dom Juan’ Review: The Perks of Being a Professional Hypocrite

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      Piety is just a pose in Ashley Tata’s gender-swapped production of Molière’s tragicomedy at Bard’s SummerScape festival.It’s a funny feeling and not always a welcome one when a play reaches out across the centuries and punches you in the throat. This happens toward the end of “Dom Juan,” Ashley Tata’s gender-swapped production of Molière’s 1665 tragicomedy at Bard’s SummerScape festival.Dom Juan (Amelia Workman), libertine extraordinaire, has finally reformed. Or has she? Turns out, her piety is just a pose. “In today’s world the finest role you can play is that of the morally upright person,” Dom Juan explains to her long-suffering, devious servant Sganarelle (Zuzanna Szadkowski). “The profession of hypocrite has countless perks.”Her cynical avowal speaks — loudly — of politics today. But wait. It gets worse. This same speech seems to prefigure internet trolling (“hypocrites create a cabal of the like-minded, if you attack one, they all turn on you”) and the way that so-called cancel culture seldom cancels anyone in power (“they just bow their heads, sigh contritely, roll their eyes, and everyone forgives them”). Lines like these might suggest savvy interpolations by the authors of this new translation: Gideon Lester, the artistic director of the Fisher Center at Bard, and Sylvaine Guyot. But no, they’re faithful renditions of the 17th-century original. The language has barely been updated.Great playwrights often have themes that they return to, over and over again. Molière’s is hypocrisy. Which should make Dom Juan, a freethinker who spends most of the play discarding social convention as casually as you or I might wad a Kleenex, a hero. Or as in this production, a heroine. Sure, Dom Juan remains a seducer. But a woman doing what she wants with her body? Sounds nice!Dom Juan’s reality is more complicated — for Molière and for Tata, too. Here is how Sganarelle describes her boss: “The greatest scoundrel who ever walked the earth, a fury, a dog, a devil, a rat, a blasphemer who doesn’t believe in heaven or hell or werewolves or anything.” Which doesn’t sound as great.“Dom Juan” asks questions — perennial ones — about what an individual owes the community and what she owes herself. As seductive as it is to see a woman resist subjugation, we are now years removed from #girlboss slogans, which is to say that the idea of freedom in the absence of ethics or solidarity has lost its shimmer. And a particular lesson of the pandemic has been how easily freedom can be weaponized, how it can make other people less free.Tata’s busy, restless production introduces these complications, though it sometimes forgets them amid the commotion of the sock puppet, the rock band, the swordplay, the lace cuffs, the haze and some very cool visual and sonic effects. (Afsoon Pajoufar designed the set, with lighting by Cha See, video design by Lisa Renkel and sound design by Chad Raines.) I laughed out loud when the show’s curtain — a tapestry of a pastoral scene — appeared to shrivel and burn. Because what fun! But for a long time in the middle, the play goes nowhere, breathlessly, and pleasure palls before Dom Juan’s comeuppance arrives.As Lester and Guyot have respected Molière’s original text, the gender-swap rarely feels complete. A woman could never have behaved this way in Molière’s day. She could barely behave this way now. Still, the swashbuckling role remains a showcase for Workman, an actress of both swagger and steel. Her Dom Juan is groovy, rowdy, but also adamantine, so unmoved by others that she is half-statue already. The supporting cast doesn’t always equal her, but Jordan Bellow offers lovely physical comedy as Dom Juan’s deserted husband, Elver, and Szadkowski’s Sganarelle has some fine unruly moments.Despite its adornments and seductions, the play is bitter at its heart. Invest too deeply in Dom Juan’s liberation or even in her punishment and the ending will leave a bad taste. The only alternative is not to care — to lose yourself instead in the production’s delights, which is not a particular chore on a sun-drenched afternoon.Otherwise, you might find yourself thinking, uneasily, of the play’s prescient moral, spoken by Sganarelle: “To have power and a wicked soul — that’s a terrible thing.”Dom JuanThrough July 17 at the Fisher Center LUMA Theater; fishercenter.bard.edu. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More