A Quiet Place
The current OUT magazine contains a fascinating article on Leonard Bernstein and his opera A Quiet Place, which is being mounted in a new production at The New York City Opera.
A Quiet Place was premiered at the Houston Grand Opera smack in the middle of Reagan's America ('83), and found something of a 'Don't Ask Don't Tell' reception, seeing that the plot involves a ménage with a gay man: draft dodging, probable suicide, alcoholism, infidelity, a funeral, the miasma of suburbia, and most importantly, a father's relationship with his son. Not your typical Maria and Tony story. Produced only few times, the piece drifted off into the operatic ether until our Six-Feet-Under age.
While the subject matter may have been a hard sell, Bernstein's writing is another matter. The work is searingly beautiful, and full of Bernstein being....well...Bernstein: funny, jazzy, dissonant, cathartic, anguished and elegiac. I agree with Christopher Alden, the stage director, that the opera's time is now. Who loves whom, marries whom, father and sons, sons to sons, and 6 recent suicides of gay young men are smack in the middle of our faces. More than Bernstein's autobiography, A Quiet Place is about love.
Go see it if you can. It won't be around very long.
You can read the OUT article here.
