Whether Peter Eötvös's musical adaptation fulfills the play's operatic potential remains an open question, despite the overall excellence of Opera Unlimited's American premiere production which opened last night. The extreme condensation of the play in Mari Mizei's libretto jettisons all but the personal and apocalyptic dimensions. Kushner's demotic torrent of language, drawn from the melting pot of ethnic and regional American speech, makes the characters complex and surprising, the way people are. ``I wish you could be more true to your ethnic profile," says Prior Walter, a man living with AIDS, to the Mormon mother of his faithless lover. The abridged text reduces the characters to stock figures, and leaves even more loose ends than the play does; it is never clear what the foul-mouthed lawyer Roy Cohen is doing here.
And until the end the music does not illumine the inner life of the people. Basically the score provides a kind of soundscape surrounding the text, some of which is spoken rather than sung. Only the Angel really gets to cut loose and sing. That said, Eötvös provides a very elegant, supple, varied soundscape that serves as a kind of punctuation for the words, or sweeps across it like a yellow highlighter pen.
In the scene in heaven near the end, which is problematic in the theater, the music finally rises to the occasion, carrying emotion on a powerful current that continues through the last scene of reconciliation and promise, with its urgent prayer for ``More life."
The Virginia Wemberly Theatre is a tricky environment for this piece. Sixteen of the 20 instrumentalists are onstage, restricting the playing area. Chris Ramos's all-white platform set suggests an antiseptic hospital; his brilliant costumes range from anonymous scrubs to revelations of character. Christopher Ostrom's lighting and projections are powerfully evocative.
