by Jonathan Allison
Associate Professor, the University of Kentucky

Paul Muldoon has written three opera libretti in collaboration with the prodigiously-talented American composer, Daron Hagen. The first of these was Shining Brow (Libretto: Faber, 1993; Vocal Score: E.C. Schirmer, 1995), based on the life of Frank Lloyd Wright, first performed in 1993 at the Madison Opera, Wisconsin. Shining Brow will be released by Arsis Audio in 2003. The second opera was Vera of Las Vegas, and the third was Bandanna (Libretto: Faber, 1999; Vocal Score: Carl Fischer, 2001). Very loosely based on Othello, and set in a small town on the US-Mexico border during the ominously named Day of the Dead, in fall 1968, Bandanna was first performed at the University of Texas Opera Theater in 1999.

Vera of Las Vegas was performed by the University of Nevada (Las Vegas) Opera Theater in March 1996, and will be performed again, in the 2003-'04 season, by the Center for Contemporary Opera, at the Nimoy Thalia Theater Space, New York City. Having to write this review, I thought it wouldn't do merely to look at the script printed by Gallery Press, without considering the musical context in which it grew. Admittedly, it is a poetic drama, worth discussing in its own right, but it has evolved out of a specific collaboration between poet and composer, is written with a musical setting in mind, and is best understood in that context.

The male protagonists of Vera of Las Vegas are two members of the Provisional IRA, 'Dumdum' Devine and 'Taco' Bell, whose conversation is filled with the kind of double enendres, puns and word play one has come to expect from characters in Muldoon's poems. (P.J. Kavanaugh meant it as a compliment when he described Muldoon as "a serious gamester.") Devine and Bell are en route for Los Angelos, to take part in Wheel of Fortune (not a common Provo destination, one imagines), stopping at Las Vegas on a layover. They have evidently made fools of themselves with the attractive air hostessess on the long flight from LaGuardia, one of whom — Doll — decides to introduce them to her Las Vegas stripper friend, the eponymous heroine of the piece, Vera. We have heard of Devine and Bell before, of course. Their illegal activities and disputed whereabouts were a matter of debate in Muldoon's play, Six Honest Serving Men (Gallery Books, 1995.)(That play featured a figure familiar to readers of Muldoon's poem "Anseo": none other than the little Provo "ward of court," Joe Ward). Along with one Dessie Gillespie, Devine and Bell had gone AWOL for two weeks, and, as one of the characters opined: "There'll be no light / shed on those three boys till some farmer turns / back into the field to plow the next score / and slices off one of their heads." In fact, two of them escaped such a fate, though we learn from Vera of Las Vegas that Devine murdered Gillespie, for undisclosed reasons; his memory of the murder provides one of several nightmarish flashback scenes in the opera.

Vera appears to be part of a covert INS sting to arrest the two men as illegal aliens, but it transpires that Trench and Trilby, the stereotypical MI5 men in trench coats, skulking in the background, are not only chasing Provos (they are seen interrogating Taco in a brief prelude to the opera), but are in pursuit of Vera as well, owing to a lawsuit she is refusing to drop, against a judge of her acquaintance: "a little sidebar / I had with a judge. A lot of side. A lot of bar." As one thing leads to another, Taco falls for Vera, who turns out to be a man, and marries her (er...him), in a perfunctory Vegas wedding. Dumdum gets paired off with Doll. The revelation of Vera's gender and Taco's seduction (much to Dumdum's disgust) is explicitly linked to a similar moment in The Crying Game, and Taco is allowed to have an unlikely epiphany, in which he sees the fundamental similarity between men and women: "What's the difference? A bit of loose skin...a fold of flesh...." The revelation of Vera's masculinity and Taco's latent homosexuality dramatizes one of the opera's central themes, that appearances are deceptive, and people, like places, are masked, malleable, and liable to change. As we are told in section XIII by the Chorus: "We shall not sleep, we shall / all be bound on the ever-whirling wheel of / of change, the which all mortal things does sway."

On one level, the opera (sub-titled "A Nightmare Cabaret Opera" on Daron Hagen's website, but the subtitle does not appear in the Gallery Press edition) concerns a journey to the center of modern America ("center" is a word that gets bandied about a lot in Vera, and undermined). It is a place of materialism, greed, mechanical pleasures and phony appearances, an alienating labyrinth in which the Irish travelers become lost and transformed. To this extent, the book hints at allegiance with Hunter S. Thompson's nightmare novel, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, another phantasmagoric journey to the heart of darkness. Early on. in reply to Dumdum's remark "the heart of America" Taco responds, "Built of sand," Yet, the opera announces its origins in the nightmare of Northern Ireland's Troubles by repeated references to Ulster place names, horrid flashbacks to obscure scenes of murder. The flashbacks revolve around the brutal killing of Dessie Gillespie, to which Taco confesses towards the close:

"I still hear the wheeps of curlews,
the buzz of bluebottles or clegs
and then a minute's silence, more or less,
before I shot him through his dicky heart."

This antipastoral moment (those curlews and bluebottles have an ironic charge here) typifies how the Tragedy of Northern Ireland underlies the whole opera, bursting to the surface repeatedly. The word "dicky" here highlights the callousness of the murderer'd language; it seems superfluous to say that Gillespie's heart was dicky. There is callousness, too, in the presentation of Gilbey's corpse, observed by Taco — "Someone had blown / his Adam's apple / clean away" and "Gilbey's head looked like a ham on a hook." The adam's apple recurs throughout the opera — it is noted that Vera actually has one -- and is linked not only to postlapsarian predicaments but also to the Big Apple, from which the men have fled. Repetition of phrase and image plays a large part in Muldoon's technique here, sewing together the libretto in a pattern of echoes. As for the violence of the imagery, the unsettling vividness of the battered corpses, this underscores the moral vacuousness of paramilitary terror, as the libretto refuses the phony appearances offered by Las Vegas, its slot machines and casinos, bringing to the rarefied atmosphere of the operatic stage an unexpected scale of imagery that one might more readily expect in The Godfather or, indeed, The Crying Game. Muldoon writes opera, as he writes poems, on his own terms.

I was fortunate enough to get hold of a demonstration disc of a performance of Vera, which will be released by CRI in 2003. It is well worth hearing. The part of 'Dumdum' is performed by a steady baritone of considerable range, and Taco by a competent tenor, whose reedy urgency conveys the roller coaster of emotion experienced by this troubled character. However, the tenor has been listening to too many old John McCormack records, leading him to play the character not in a Belfast accent, but in a rather forced West of Ireland brogue; that's OK, he shouldn't sound like Van Morrison singing "TB Sheets," but it jars a little at the start. Doll's part is performed by a very striking soprano, who sings very well in the duet, but I particularly enjoyed the aria "The Thing I Love About Las Vegas" (VI). Vera's countertenor performs the soulful autobiographical aria, "For I, Vera, am the Way" (XIV) with feeling. The female chorus does sterling work singing harmonies, by turns sassy, satiric, and contemplative, as The Attendants (II,IV), the Casino Girls (VIII), the Dancers (X). They perform as the Wedding Chapel Choir in XIII, and their lyrical hymn — "The ever-whirling wheel of change" — elaborates memorably a key theme in Vera.

The music is an invigorating melange of traditional operatic styles, complemented by riffs from pop songs, torch song ballads, and Broadway tunes (sometimes accompanied by big brass, or off-key jazz trumpet), and informed by a kind of brash, modernist dissonance, at times reminiscent of the blousy impertinence of the great Weill/Brecht songs of Threepenny Opera. Indeed, the Weill/Brecht relationship comes to mind as readily as the great poetic collaborations of W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten, even though both Auden and Britten have appeared as characters in Muldoon's poetry, and the poet seems likely to have taken an interest in them as writers of opera. The inclusiveness and eclecticism of the music, it should be said, does not make the opera disintegrate into fragments — it is not a mess of allusions — since the thing is sustained by a firm musical narrative, under whose control there is scope for radical variations. And the postmodern (if you will) style of mixing suits the Muldoon script, comprehending as it does traditions of high and popular culture, bringing into the great tradition of the aria the seedy, feverish world of political murder, Hollywood movies (The Crying Game, School Daze), the lyricism of Sondheim, and the sweaty passions of U2: "Remember Bono / and the Edge in Las Vegas?" But what about feeling? Is it possible that the willful embrace of hybrid styles, no matter how brilliant or perhaps because so brilliant, can render a story vacant, can ignore or crimp the vein of feeling that otherwise might be tapped? I think the answer is that Hagen's musical score deepens the emotional energy of the characters, bringing out their obsessive feelings of guilt, confusion, alienation, self-hatred, anger, and indeed affection that are implicit there. It is an emotional piece of music, and altogether rather powerful.

Remember the old bibliographic chestnut, "If the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre, where is Hamlet?" Vera of Las Vegas is the Muldoon libretto, published by Gallery, but it is also the recording; it's also the sum of its performances. Admittedly, the libretto is different from the operatic text (understood here as a musical performance), and each of these texts has its peculiar strengths, but for the full effect, witness a performance.