A Provocative Twist on the Bible & the Baroque
At Georgetown, a Gay 'David et Jonathas'

By Rebecca J. Ritzel
Special to the Washington Post
Friday, May 2, 2008

"Open up. Let me see those chompers," soprano Rebecca Duren demanded of her co-star, countertenor Brian Cummings. "I don't want a fake opera kiss. I want a full-on, open-mouth kiss."

Cummings obliged. But the ensuing embrace got a little complicated.

"Wait," Duren said, dropping her hands to her side. "I need to see how guys hug."

Timothy Nelson, the director, stepped forward and awkwardly wrapped his arms around Cummings, trying out different hand positions while Duren watched, running her fingers through her freshly cropped hair. Still not satisfied, she asked who was the dominant male in the relationship.

This scene, which played out last week in the basement of a South Baltimore church, does not reflect the usual protocol at an opera rehearsal. But American Opera Theater, which is presenting the rarely done 17th-century opera "David et Jonathas" by Marc-Antoine Charpentier tonight through Sunday at Georgetown University's Gonda Theatre, is not your average regional opera company. Run with an anti-establishment spirit by Nelson, its 28-year-old founder, the troupe aspires to high musical standards but will go to great lengths to keep the audience watching.

This production of "David et Jonathas" represents a double gamble for the small group. It is going on next week to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York's temple of alternative highbrow entertainment. And it portrays two ancient Hebrew warriors -- the young Goliath-slayer (played by Cummings) and his best friend, the prince Jonathan (played by Duren, who cut her shoulder-length hair for the role) -- as gay lovers.

Revisionist stagings are the norm for Nelson, who formed the company in 2002, when he was fresh out of Baltimore's Peabody Conservatory. Bored with the East Coast early-music scene, he and his friends -- including Duren, lighting designer Kel Millionie and harpsichordist Adam Pearl -- struck out on their own, calling themselves Ignoti Dei Opera until they decided that the name was pretentious and, Duren notes, "tough to pronounce."

AOT has presented a mix of brilliant and bizarre early-music productions in the years since. Most successful was Handel's "Acis and Galatea" in 2007, re-imagined by Nelson as a circus act and calling for Duren to sing upside down. Shortly thereafter, Nelson moved to Barcelona, following his partner, a Spanish violinist. He continues to run AOT long-distance, holding meetings with his board over the Internet telephone service Skype. Last fall the company began a three-year residency at Gonda Theatre; in December it experimented with dramatizing Handel's "Messiah" (Washington Post reviewer Joe Banno found Nelson's decision to bludgeon and crucify an angel at Christmastime "an interesting notion").

Nelson's musicians, a growing coterie of respected early-music singers and instrumentalists, keep coming back for more. Many of the "David et Jonathas" cast members are reprising roles from a 2005 staging that Nelson has retroactively started calling "a workshop." Duren appeared in a supporting role then; she eagerly agreed to star this time around, in what Nelson is billing as the work's professional, fully staged American premiere.

"I really don't like opera much," Duren said. "I just like doing this."

Charpentier, a French composer of mostly sacred music, wrote "David et Jonathas" in 1688 -- as, in effect, the spring musical for College Louis-le-Grand, a Jesuit seminary in Paris. The piece was originally conceived as a set of musical interludes to alternate with three hours of Latin readings, based on the biblical story; but the spoken text is long lost. What remains is a libretto that Nelson calls "psychological character reflections," which suits him well. "I don't like linear narrative," he says. "It's the bane of my existence."

This is all very fine and postmodern, but potentially confusing to viewers.

"It's a little bit of a problem for the audience," said Bruce Gustafson, a scholar of French baroque music who teaches at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa. "You are given these wonderful emotional reflections on a story that you have not been told. The basic narrative of the story that was in the play isn't there. If you are looking for emotional impact, it's there and it's wonderful, but the nuts and bolts of the plot are not. You are supposed to know who these people are, and what their problem is."

Their problem, as laid out in the Old Testament's First Book of Samuel, is that the Israelites and Philistines are at war, again, and the people are starting to think David might make a better king than Saul. The opera opens with Saul visiting the Witch of Endor, who predicts his demise, and closes with David lamenting the death of Jonathan, who loved him "better than a woman."

Ah, yes. And David loved Jonathan. The nature of that love has given rise to considerable theological debate. Tod Linafelt, a biblical studies professor at Georgetown University, will enter the fray this fall, when the Journal of Religion publishes his article analyzing David's lament. Linafelt took a hard look at the ancient Hebrew, and came away convinced that the writer intended to convey David and Jonathan's relationship as "ambiguous and complex."

"You can't say for sure if their relationship was romantic," Linafelt said. "But there is a lot of homoerotic language there."

Gustafson and other scholars strongly doubt that Charpentier had homosexuality on the brain when he wrote the opera back in the 17th century. Nelson acknowledges this, and says his staging of "David et Jonathas" is not a political statement, but an aesthetic practicality. The role of Jonathas was written for a boy soprano, a student at the Jesuit school. If Nelson put a 12-year-old boy in the role today, he'd be "in a heap of trouble," he says. So instead he cast Duren as a cross-dressing soprano.

It remains to be seen whether the work can bear out Nelson's large-scale ambitions. Attendance at the company's first production in Georgetown, a staged Renaissance song cycle called "Ground," was so poor that Nelson proclaimed it a disaster on his blog ( http://americanoperatheater.blogspot.com). Now he is faced with trying to fill 900 seats for each performance at BAM's Opera House. AOT is self-producing this Brooklyn venture, supported by the Geoffrey C. Hughes Foundation and the Institute for Living Judaism in Brooklyn. It is a huge gamble, and possibly a make-or-break one for a small young company. Nelson is hoping that the prospect of a gay baroque opera will get people talking about "David et Jonathas," and the company that had the chutzpah to stage it.

"I don't know of another opera like this," Nelson said. "It's so powerful to see a typical opera love story -- tragic death, the whole caboodle -- except it's between two men."