The second season of SF Opera Lab opened last week at the Dianne and Tad Taube Atrium Theater with composer Ted Hearne's digital-age oratorio The Source. The libretto by Mark Doten is culled from the classified data leaked by US Army private Chelsea Manning to WikiLeaks and released to its media partners in 2010.
Manning was convicted in 2013 on numerous military infractions and counts of espionage, theft and computer fraud. Sentenced to 35 years' imprisonment, Chelsea (or Bradley, as she was then known) announced she was transgender and requested the necessary treatments. After she went on hunger strike in 2016, the Army allowed her gender transition surgery. During the last week of his administration, President Obama commuted Manning's sentence to a total of seven years, and she is set for release in May 2017.
Chelsea's saga is as complicated as the vast amount of information she leaked, and it has provoked every bit as much controversy and analysis. The material itself and the personalities involved in the leaks �" don't forget Julian Assange and former hacker Adrian Lamo, who reported Manning to the authorities �" would seem impossible to encapsulate, let alone musicalize. Ted Hearne and Mark Doten, with director Daniel Fish and production designer Jim Findley, have managed brilliantly to create an immersive theatrical mixed-media performance that tackles the challenge in a mere 75 minutes.
Divided in two sections facing each other, the audience sits with four implanted singers, surrounded by four towering screens, with a chamber band of musicians on a platform behind one of them. The projections show a diverse (age, gender, ethnicity) group of volunteer participants in extreme close-up as they watch an 11-minute video later dubbed "Collateral Murder."
Much of the data in the "War Logs" is set as recitative, and the singers croon, belt and sprechstimme (speech-voice) their way through it with voices electronically processed by an intriguing method of auto-tuning. They sound both detached and intensely human, a description that could be applied to the entire work.
Hearne uses lightning-quick samplings of songs by singers including Dinah Washington and Clay Aiken, and snippets of lyrics from songs from composers Kurt Weill/Bertolt Brecht to Jerome Kern/Otto Harbach, as punctuation for his rock-inflected score.
There are a surprising number of discernible original tunes, and the terrific vocalists �" soprano Melissa Hughes, bass-baritone Jonathan Woody and singer/actors Samia Mounts and Isaiah Robinson �" all display an impressive range, equally at ease with pop, classical lieder and high-end Broadway.
Spolier Alert in this paragraph! The arc of the libretto culminates in an actual real-time viewing of the horrific tape, seen by the onscreen participants, showing the killing of civilians and journalists mistaken as enemy combatants.
Lights up; silence; a long and uncomfortable pause as the stunned audience faces off in ticking moments of contrasting emotions and a strange combination of isolation and communion. You could call it a coup de theatre, but that would minimize the production's intent.
Staying for the Q&A after the performance is recommended. This will happen each night and afternoon of the run. It helps sort our feelings, and starts a conversation that will inevitably continue.
In an age of divisive politics on war, gender, and issues of personal responsibility, we are bombarded daily in the media. Processing an incredible amount of information is both confusing and exhausting. Breaking off an 11-minute chunk from the vast amount of the WikiLeaks data and presenting it to us unadorned in the end makes a shocking impact. Hearne's and Doten's The Source resonates as far more than an evening's musical theatre diversion. No simple answers are given, but at least we get a chance to confront our opinions.
The Source continues at the Taube Atrium Theater, Diane B. Wilsey Center for Opera, March 1-3 at 8 p.m.