The Rosenbergs: The
Opera
A review by Rosie
Rosenzweig
Resident Scholar, Brandeis
University Women’s Studies Research Center
How does one write a story about a
story that everyone knows? Or at least knows its ending?
This was the challenge of Greek
Tragedians from the late 6th century BCE whose plays were
entered into competitions in Dionysia in Athens, where the audiences
already knew all the traditional stories of Greek myths. This was
also the challenge presented to American born playwright Rhea Leman
living in Denmark when she was asked to write an opera about the
Rosenbergs. Although already well-known throughout Denmark and
Europe, she had never written an opera before; yet this opera was
declared Denmark’s Best Opera in 2015. In a recent talkback after
the opera’s Boston premiere, Leman said that, because everyone in
Denmark is well educated through its free university system, they
already knew about how the Rosenbergs were executed for giving atomic
secrets to the Russians during the 1950’s Cold War era.
Leman, in collaboration with Joachim
Holbeck, famed Danish composer for over 50 film and theater
productions, talked about using 1930s show tunes when Rosenbergs were
courting to be married. Leman, who grew up as the NY child of Jewish
left wing activists with frequent dinnertime discussions about the
Rosenberg case, searched for some reason for the Rosenberg’s life
choices, and learned about “their tremendous love and commitment to
each other. Their love became the key to my writing.” Ultimately
this approach, about two people in love, provided the well-known
story with a unique, timeless and relevant approach to an old story.
It also elevated it to the “David against Goliath” realm of
individual idealism battling the political weltanschauung of
the time, namely the paranoia of the McCarthy Era, dubbed a “witch
hunt” after Arthur Miller’s Puritan era play The Crucible;
here social hysteria used the law to unlawfully convict and
execute innocent victims. So now the tale assumes a mythic quality
wherein personal love and idealism are pitted against the backdrop of
the larger forces of history.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
This is why Boston Playwrights’
Theatre’s “first foray into opera” chose this production:
Artistic Director Kate Snodgrass says that “this story couldn’t
be more relevant to today’s political climate – we must remember
our past in order to preserve our future . . . [The story is] moving
and alive without being overly political, and it speaks to Ethel and
Julius’s relationship – which gets short-shrift when we think
about this period in our nation’s history. . . Whether we think of
the Rosenbergs as heroes or traitors, in the end they were people
living out a tragic love story.”
Christie
Lee Gibson as Ethel in the foreground; Brian Church as Julius in the
background.
Ahh, the love story is so well done
here with the shy courting of Julius who “sees a stranger across a
crowded room” (to borrow the lyrics from the 1941 South Pacific
show) and knows it’s his true love. As children of the
Haskala,
(the Jewish Enlightenment when secular education and political activism trumped the
parochial leanings of religion), and immigrant parents, they have so
much in common; she thinks he is an angel with wings. When Julius
first sees Ethel singing at an event, he is smitten. Afterwards when
he asks her to sing, she performs an aria. (This request is repeated
when they are in jail, awaiting the verdict.) After they dance
together in this scene to “Pennies from heaven,” he says he would
love “to be locked up with her.” During the wedding ceremony, the
words “until death do us part” hangs as a prediction of the end
we all know. Such skillful foreboding to the end we all know.
Brian Church, as Julius, is a singer
who can also act through the various vicissitudes of innocent first
love, joyful married man with children, optimistic idealist for a
cause, and the trembling moments awaiting the final verdict of his
fate. Julius here is the tragic hero, whose tragic flaw paves the
way for his downfall. And what is his tragic flaw? His idealism is a
better future for mankind, a future that lies with his starry-eyed
depiction of communism, a belief born in the depression when Russia
seemed to have a better system to fight poverty; he wants a world
that he says he would strive for and die for. And he did.
Christie Lee Gibson as Ethel has a
range from opera to musical theatre; when she assumes the masculine
lower register enacting Judge Kaufman, the inquisitor of the trail,
she becomes a predator surprisingly multi-dimensional in her scope.
She proves to be the stronger of the pair, more determined to prove
her husband’s innocence.
The bare bones stage set with a ladder
against a cement wall, some black chairs, and the dark floor of
porous soil brings to mind the sands of time and the repetitive
history that cycles through eternity. Director Dmitry Troyanovsky
chose this for its claustrophic ambience, which fostered the paranoia
of the era where “two regular people [are] crushed by the
juggernaut of history.” He describes the set as a “metaphoric
space . . . [which] evokes a burial ground and a chilling
institutional purgatory. It is also a place of private and historical
memory, framing the operatic ritual that finally releases the ghosts
of Ethel and Julius to tell the story in their own words.” These
words, by the way, were taken from their love letters in jail.
Troyanovsky’s decision to have the
musical trio of piano, cello, and violin onstage playing in the sands
of time allowed for the music to become another character in the
drama. When we realize the musical cues arrive through eye contact
and the repetitive drumming of percussive insistence parallels the
intuitive cues of the love story, we can feel in our bones the
insistent replaying of history in all its dimensions. Composer
Joachim Holbek commented that there was really a “quintet on
stage.” A musician in the audience appreciated this professionally
and said that he loved the “juxtaposition of jazz, musical theatre,
and opera” in what the director called a “chamber opera.”
The story ‘s insistence, that we must
know our past to know our future, is born out dramatically in the
second act when the repeated declaration of the founding father’s
vision gets answered with Julius swearing that he believes in these
ideals also. We hope that the telling of this story will bring some
peace to the ghosts of Julius and Ethel and their children who keep
petitioning for a post-humus pardoning for their mother. While Ethel
kept singing that her children will “never get over this,” a
recent Brandeis graduate in the audience declared that she may never
get over the themes of the play from another point of view. Mea
Siegel declared that “their idealism resonates with me because I
just came from the March for Science and because my friends and I
find them against the world scary in these times, but also so
inspiring.”
