Bob Dylan hovers over this opera, which tells a story about early 1970s radicals who become fugitives for some three decades. The connection is deliberate if indirect, but Dylan also comes to mind through an accident of timing.
“Eat the Document,” which is premiering at HERE Arts Center as part of the Prototype festival, is based on a 2006 novel with the same title, written by Dana Spiotta. The novelist in turn took her title from a 1966 documentary film about Bob Dylan. The film “Eat the Document” is not just about Dylan; it’s sort of by him too; he directed and re-edited the footage by filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker, which ABC had commissioned but which the network rejected as being incomprehensible for a mainstream audience. Dylan’s title has been interpreted as a middle finger declaration of independence against the sort of well-made documentary that Pennebaker had produced about Dylan a year earlier, “Don’t Look Back.”
In this way, the title captures the rebellious spirit of the Sixties and early Seventies. But, taken literally, it also suggests the elimination of official records — and by extension the erasing of history. That’s what Bobby and Mary in effect wind up trying to do.
Mary and Bobby are an idealistic young couple (portrayed by Danielle Buonaiuto and Tim Russell), who have been joining protests against the Vietnam War, but, feeling them ineffective and insufficient, they plan something more extreme — a bomb — which goes terribly wrong.
“It wasn’t supposed to go down that way,” Mary says, shocked.
“The thing to do is get across state lines, as soon as possible,” Bobby says.
They split up, go on the lam, take on new identities. A quarter century later, Mary has become Louise (Amy Justman), a cooking teacher in the suburb, with a 15-year-old son Jason (Russell again) unaware of her history. Bobby is now Nash (Paul Pinto) who runs an anarchist bookstore, which happens to be just a few towns away, but they have not kept in touch and don’t realize they live close by.
As with the novel, the opera toggles between the two eras. But Kelley Rourke’s libretto feels like something of a greatest hits from Spiotta’s book, whose pages contain more elaborated plotlines and developed characters; the most solid storyline in the opera is Jason’s sleuthing to discover his mother’s big secret. The novel also allows a deeper exploration of issues that are little more than hinted at on stage – the downside of the very American art and practice of reinvention/ the loneliness of living a lie, the uses and abuses of nostalgia, the evolution of idealism.
But Spiotta’s “Eat the Document” is itself hardly the final word, nor certainly the first word, in fictionalizing the true stories of young radicals from the Sixties and early Seventies growing into middle aged fugitives. It was the subject of Marge Piercy’s 1979 novel “Vida“ and director Sidney Lumet’s 1988 film “Running on Empty,“ which starred River Phoenix as a son discovering the truth about his parents Judd Hirsch and Christine Lahti. (And Philip Roth deals with more or less the same premise in “American Pastoral”)
If there is a justification for reimagining this story yet again, this time as an opera, it’s in telling the story through the music of the two eras – especially, one can argue, in the earlier era, when music was central to the culture (aka the counterculture.)
I’m guessing this is what interested composer John Glover, and he makes an obvious effort to lace his operatic score with sounds reminiscent of the 60s and 70s, and makes a point of contrasting them with the music of two decades later. Most of the songs are meant to be protest songs. In the beginning, the ensemble sings a sort of strident anti-war anthem:
And the voice becomes a chorus
And the song becomes a roar
No more. No more. No more.
Later in the 1990s, in a contrast in both subject and style, Sissy (Natalie Trumm) , who hangs out in Nash’s bookstore, belts a pop-rock number “Unsustainable,” which rails against animal cruelty. (This doesn’t go over well with another 90s activist, Miranda, portrayed by Buonaiuto: “I hate animal supremacists…. fur coats are offensive, but it is because of the cost, not the animals. Someone spends twenty thousand dollars on a coat while there are people without food and shelter. That’s what’s offensive.”)
The eight-member ensemble perform these songs wonderfully. But I recently saw “A Complete Unknown,” in which Timothee Chalamet sings Dylan’s actual protest songs from the 60s (and Monica Barbaro sings Baez’s, etc), and Glover’s compositions struck me less as an effort at pastiche of the music that people like Bobby/Nash and Mary/Louise listened to than as a 21st century opera composer’s sophisticated take on 20th century American popular music.
It’s telling to me that the central musical number by far – it leads to a pivotal moment in the plot -comes about because of Jason’s obsession with the music of his mother’s youth. But we don’t hear him play pastiches of, say, “The Times They Are A’Changing” or “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” He is ecstatic to have discovered in a garage sale a pristine record from 1967 (31 years earlier) which the libretto calls “Beach Boys-ish.” The ensemble then sings a song with “lush, choral texture.” It doesn’t take all that much sleuthing to realize that Glover is paying homage to the Beach Boys’ famously unreleased 1967 album “Smile.” We seem in the hands less of a dramatist than of a music aficionado.
Eat the Document is at HERE as part of Prototype through January 17.
