Setting Aside One Bit of Genius For Another

The brilliance of Met Titles is that it's up to the listener whether she wants to turn them on or not. They aren't looming above the stage, distracting you from the action, and for the most part, you can't see your neighbor's. For all you know, he could have his titles off as he sits through his 100th viewing of an opera he knows by heart.

It is a brilliant solution to an age-old hurdle for opera goers. Why on Earth the MET allowed Phelim McDermott to shut them off for Satyagraha is, and apparently shall remain, a mystery.

McDermott's argument is (in a nutshell), "The words aren't important". His view is that the opera is a meditation on the libretto by Constance DeJong, almost in the way one might meditate on a Psalm. Fair enough, but how is that different than any opera?

All you need is a decent actor with a good bass to convey the loss Colline suffers when he pawns his overcoat. No one at a halfway decent performance of La Bohème really needs a word-for-word translation of "Vecchia Zimarra" to catch on to what's happening in that moment.

DeJong's libretto is far from entirely poetical. It relies heavily on scenario and rather protracted speeches (again, the same way any libretto does).

Our chief objection to the abandonment of the titles isn't that it made the opera hard to follow, but that it severely delimited the possible experiences of it. Instead of the listener choosing what to read for himself, we are left with McDermott's choices, as he projects certain words on the back wall of the stage.

For the first 10 minutes, there's bupkis up there, and then all of the sudden, a couple of sentences show up. So, there's an immediate, forced shift to reading mode, and then back to contemplation when they disappear. As the opera progresses, you start to wonder how McDermott is choosing which fragments of the text to project, and it all adds up to an enormous distraction. Just leave the Met Titles on and be done with it! We guarantee it would give folks like this a better time.

McDermott's emphasis is puzzling in more ways than just this business with the libretto, though. Gandhi's intellectual cousins hover over the scene in cutouts on the back wall. First, it's Tolstoy scribbling away at a desk. Then it's Tagore, and finally, a very Obama-looking MLK. But this poor schmo has to climb a ladder and stand on a pedestal in the middle of the stage for the better part of a half hour, waving his arm in the air in vaguely Hitlerian gestures (MLK never waved like that).

All of the eloquence of the Tolstoy/Tagore references evaporates when Gandhi embraces the base of the podium. McDermott is slathering on a virtual baton passing which, again, becomes obnoxious in the way it pulls focus.

For the most part, the pantomime works brilliantly, but as with everything in this production, the balance is way off. The most arresting image on the MET stage this decade is the entrance of the puppets in the second act. It is a heart stopping moment, but as soon as they walk onstage and loom over Gandhi, they are gone.

However, the rather cute, but trivial, idea of lacing the stage with packing tape goes on for a solid 10 minutes. Once the gag reaches its limit, the tape is gathered up into a vague stick figure, balled up and then flown offstage. Whatever for? It might have worked if the flying offstage bit hadn't shown up already in an earlier scene.

And for Vishnu's sake, don't get us started on all the slow motion movement!

Though the whole Satyagraha experience is frustrating enough to warrant a few hundred words worth of griping, none of this impacts the bottom line, which is that it is an extraordinary evening. Tonight is the last performance in this run, and with any luck it will come back many, many times.