Seeing Nico Muhly's Dark Sisters at Gotham Chamber Opera was an unexpected opportunity, and, as it turned out, a deeply unsettling experience. The plot could be described as a fantasy on themes from the headlines, exploring and imagining narratives behind the 2008 raid which took 400 children from a Texan FLDS community into custody, following allegations of physical and sexual abuse. Transforming these events and the commentary on them into an opera has yielded intriguing results. Muhly appears deeply aware of the (problematic) histories of opera's focus on the suffering and singing of women. Dark Sisters is a work which is intensely focused on both, but also on the power of histories and myths--individual and collective--and on the tense issue of how narrative is controlled, often by men for women. With the first explosive, destabilizing contact with the outside world before the curtain's rise, the music is left to deal with the tensions resulting from, and revealed by, the dramatic event. The music given to the small ensemble (led sensitively by Neal Goren) is strongly atmospheric, and more than a little unsettling. Strings murmur ominously; a solo cello wails. There are strong contributions from grouped and solo woodwinds as well (nice oboe work) with brass only occasional, but dramatically effective. The ensemble also features a harp, a piano, chimes, and a wind machine. One curious characteristic of the opera is that, although the music certainly changes in texture to indicate shifts in mood and atmosphere throughout, there is not a strong evolution in the style of the music to follow the crisis-punctuated disintegration of the community. The precise, poetic libretto of Stephen Karam works symbiotically with the music; it might seem exaggerated or heavy-handed as a play; the music gives it nuance and ambiguity. The nature of the drama works against both dramatic eruptions and strongly individualized voice writing, although the latter does, as it were, break through.The set was simple, and usually empty, with a raked stage colored like the red Texan earth, and projections depicting the changes in a large and troubled sky. In fine operatic tradition, portents in nature echo the cataclysmic events of the plot; the distressed opening ensemble takes place during a lunar eclipse. Movements throughout are strongly stylized; changes from this deliberate and limited vocabulary of physical expression signal trouble (Rebecca Taichman directed, and made the choreography clear and expressive.) The first act takes place entirely within the household, and within the women's imaginations. In the second act, the opera audience is suddenly a television audience confronted with an all-too-familiar invasive news program. The role of the prodding reporter is doubled with that of the prophet (reinforcing the theme of the male control of narrative, and the breakdown of that control.) The wives grouped together in the interview room were seated on stage; projections were used to show us the probing, interpretation-imposing closeups of the TV reportage as they sang. It is in this scene that the final fracturing of the community begins; when the curtain falls several scenes later, the long-term effects of this fracturing are still unclear.
