Load In/Load Out: Goodbye To Anna & The City Opera

I like living near BAM. On Sunday afternoon walks, I sometimes pass the Opera House or Harvey Theater when the stage doors are open, giving me a peek backstage during load-in or load-out. I relish any glimpse behind the curtain, at the great wide spaces that remind me of a bare factory floor, a theatrical Vehicle Assembly Building where absolutely anything can be created. Seen from Hanson Place, the backstage of the Opera House is cavernous, and to watch a few dozen stagehands hustle crate after crate off of two or three or four semi-trailers is to be awed by the work that goes into filling that stage. "We've got a budget," says BAM, "and we're going to use it."

There's great promise in a load-in. Watching load-out can be bittersweet, or just plain heartbreaking, as with the day I saw Santo Loquasto's beautiful scenery for The Master Builder  tossed into a dumpster on Ashland, the steeple that figures in the play's climax poking out of a pile of garbage. But that's theater. When a run is finished, it's over—the scenery discarded or repurposed, the space adapted for some other story. It's a cycle of renewal, and even when it's bittersweet, it is a happy thing.

This is different from some of the other bits of entertainment with which I fill my days. When I passed BAM yesterday, I was on my way home from the last Mets game of the season, wallowing in the particular anguish that comes with the close of the regular season. Baseball is a simple pleasure, endlessly available from April through October, but like all seasonal joys, we lose it suddenly and violently. The last day of the regular season is painful in the way that summer's last beach day, trip to the park, or icy mint julep can be. They are simple pleasures, but the close of the season is a reminder that one day we will get our last sunburn, fly our last kite, and watch our last ballgame. Remembering that is no fun at all.

Theater is not a simple pleasure. It is maddening, overpriced, doomed and pretentious. But it also offers something rare—that sense of panic that comes when a good play is ending, as we try to keep our eyes wide open, to take in as much of the scene as possible, knowing that we will never be able to see it again. (I plan to die the same way.) That straining desperation is a form of the sublime, and the sublime is nothing to sneeze at. 

On a sunny afternoon a few weeks ago, I passed the Opera House and saw a truck full of what appeared to be pink Lincoln Logs. "Ooh," I thought. "That must be for Anna Nicole ." I'd been waiting for the well-reviewed British opera to land in New York for over a year, and the sight of all that pink, sturdy-looking wood took my anticipation up another notch. "What could it be?" I wondered. "Does it all fit together to make a pink, uncomfortably ribbed sofa?" (That this was my best guess shows that I don't have much of a nose for set design.)  

When the curtain rose on the performance of Anna  I saw, it turned out that the Lincoln Logs formed the backdrop—a kind of pink log cabin wall meant to establish Anna's humble origins. And though the opera disappointed me bitterly—in the way that simpler pleasures never can—I'm glad I got to experience those months of anticipation, and the thrill I felt at seeing the set stacked up outside. I didn't know what it was, but I knew those logs were the raw ingredients for something magical. That's a cool thing to feel sure of, even when you turn out wrong.

Yesterday, as I tried to hold on to the fading flavor of another season of meaningless baseball, I saw Anna  being dismantled. What had come in with such promise was being taken away in disappointment. The logs had reverted to logs. After just a handful of performances, the show was over, and there could be no promise of rebirth. The Opera House stage will be filled again, but the City Opera is likely on its way out. That it died a shell of itself—staging an abbreviated season of half-baked British opera, begging on Kickstarter and performing far from its original home—does not make this collapse any more sad.

I was musing on the metaphorical death of summer, of baseball, of the pathetic Mets and their pathetic 2013, when I passed a real death on Hanson Place, and saw the body being dragged to the curb. 

Leave Anna Alone!

Was it dumb of me to expect nuance from Anna Nicole? The opera, which is currently playing a too-short run at BAM, was well-reviewed when it opened in London last year, and has been eagerly anticipated (by me) for the last few months. Although some were confused by Marc-Anthony Turnage's chosen subject, it made perfect sense to me. Anna Nicole Smith was a beautiful woman—truly—who wanted wealth and destroyed herself in the pursuit of it, becoming fodder for late-night jokes and endless lawsuits. In 2006, she gave birth to a daughter and lost a son within three days, and died six months later. What could be more operatic than that?

The only pitfall would be if Richard Thomas's libretto failed to take Anna seriously. British critiques of American culture don't always play well on this side of the Atlantic, and any sense that the all-British team was making fun of their exceptionally American hero would be sure to turn me off. The Times  promised I would not be disappointed:

The three creators, all British, certainly had fun depicting Smith’s tawdry American life and skewering reality television. But their Anna emerged as an improbable operatic heroine; a restless woman yearning to escape her backwater birthplace, Mexia, Tex.; a striver determined to get ahead and raise a son in any way possible. Isn’t this the American dream?

I don't know what opera they were watching. Anna Nicole gave me a sick feeling from the first scenes, when her family is introduced as a gang of toothless, comic hicks. The Tennessean in me is highly sensitive to this kind of thing, but I'd like to think that the atrociously sung Southern accents would have made any audience member uneasy. That the comedy of the play's first part is built on jokes about Walmart, fried chicken and spousal abuse bother me not as an overproud southerner, but because they're lazy cracks. An opera should do better.

More troubling is the play's treatment of its heroine, who lacks the mad, irresistible ambition that defines most great operatic heroines. Instead, she is unassuming, dimwitted, and powerless. The only moment when the production slows down long enough to take her yearning seriously is in the moments after she's gotten her breast implants—a flimsy plastic-looking prosthetic that made Sarah Joy Miller look like one of the "sexy" mannequins that appear in costume shop windows around Halloween. (NSFW, I guess, if your boss thinks mannequins are erotic.)

From there, Anna Nicole shows no interest in the possibility that Anna might have been playing a part to get what she wanted. Her 89 year-old meal ticket, played by the powerful tenor Robert Brubaker, sings of his love for Anna's "baby voice," which might have been interesting if she hadn't been using a baby voice throughout. As a substitute for depth, Anna has chronic back pain—penance paid for her oversized implants, suggesting that breast augmentation wasn't just her original sin, but the whole of her character. She jumps up and down when given jewelry, she fawns over bodybuilders, she uses an on-stage toilet and walks away from it with toilet paper trailing from her butt. This is not a flattering portrayal.

The fat suit she dons for the plays conclusion, which was more exaggerated than Jenna Maroney's , was the most obvious indication that Thomas and Turnage had missed the point of their heroine's decline. Anna Nicole Smith did gain weight, and lost it and gained it again, but she was never obese. She was tacky and embarrassing the way that any painkiller addict might be if put on television, and the American tabloid media is quick to label any star who's gained weight a whale. That the opera goes along with that depiction told me that they were unable to find any interiority for Anna, and instead went along with the popular narrative of her life and death. Because that was such a hateful narrative, we are given a hateful opera.

In an interview with New York , Turnage said “If I’m really honest, I’m quite uncomfortable with it now. I don’t think we were trying to be cruel. But it’s mocking someone’s real life. I wouldn’t do it again.”

That discomfort shows. Rather than taking their heroine serious from the first scene, Turnage and Thomas let the audience laugh at Anna for the first 90 minutes of the production, and then try to change course just at the end. Unsurprisingly, that half-hearted approach fails. 

At the end of her opera, Anna laments her mistakes. "I was wrong," she sings. "I was weak." It's impossible to imagine Turandot or Carmen or even Madame Butterfly being so apologetic. It wouldn't have taken much imagination to make Anna Nicole Smith's already tragic story larger than life. Anna Nicole , sadly, is much smaller than it.