Dora at Baltimore Theatre Project (review)

The Peabody Chamber Opera's production of Dora by composer Melissa Shiflett and librettist Nancy Fales Garrett (Baltimore Theater Project, April 23-26, 2009); review.

Saturday's cast gave Dora an excellent performance, with superlative singing and fine acting through the story's considerable emotional range. The orchestra likewise provided estimable support in their reading of the conservative tonal score. Expert vocal writing showed the singers to good effect in solo arias and ensemble numbers, with the sextet "What Do Women Want?" an especially well-constructed example. The use of violin harmonics beneath the disturbing revelations of the K's children was a notable touch of effective orchestration in an otherwise thickly homophonic and unvaried texture.

Regrettably, by intermission it was clear that Dora's creators had missed the opportunity to engage with the profound implications of Freud's work, choosing instead to reduce one of the great thinkers of modern times to the usual caricature of a walking double entendre. I declined to stay for the second act, having seen that theatrical impact in Dora was achieved at every turn by the crude rather than the thoughtful, and artistic director Roger Brunyate missed no opportunity to foreground the lurid still further. (For an example of profound treatment of a great mind, consider Philip Glass and Robert Wilson's groundbreaking Einstein on the Beach.)

Even more troubling than the failure to offer intelligent insight into psychoanalysis is that Dora, in exaggerating the offenses of our cultural phallocentrism, re-inscribes and reinforces those offenses by objectifying women, quite literally in the conclusion of Act I and in only slightly more subtle ways throughout. Woman is presented as either frigid corpse (Frau Bauer), virgin (Dora) or whore (Frau K), projected through costumes of black, white and red. Taken together, even these color choices tacitly associate the feminine with the demonic.

Freud's Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria still awaits a truly perspicacious treatment, and I look forward to hearing and seeing the extraordinarily gifted Peabody Chamber Opera staging more discerning works in the future.