This is the Rill Speaking

music by Lee Hoiby
libretto by Mark Shulgasser
based upon an original text by Lanford Wilson

and

Trouble in Tahiti

music and text by Leonard Bernstein
reduced orchestration by Garth Edwin Sunderland

Jennifer Blades, stage director

Thom Bumblauskas, set designer

JoAnn Kulesza, music director

Blair Skinner and Lee Mills, conductors

Thursday to Saturday, February 24–26, 2011, at 7:30 p.m.

Sunday, February 27, 2011, at 3:00 p.m.

Theatre Project, 45 West Preston Street, Baltimore

Admission $25 / Seniors $15 / Students with ID $10

Tickets available from Theatre Project online, or call 410/752–8558

Peabody Opera home

The Peabody Chamber Opera continues its annual series of productions at Theatre Project with a musical return to the middle of the past century. This double bill of one-act operas is offered as a tribute to the nineteen-fifties, an age when America was settling down to hopes of peace and prosperity. We contrast an urban vision with a rural idyll, the one showing anxiety about an edgy future, the other nostalgia for a simpler past. Leonard Bernstein wrote Trouble in Tahiti in 1952, as a satirical look at the tensions and anomie hidden behind the postwar prosperity. Lanford Wilson’s play This is the Rill Speaking and the opera that Lee Hoiby and Mark Shulgasser made from it come from the early nineties, and offer a look back at less complex times. Both operas are intimate, immediate, and highly entertaining. Although both shows have been prepared musically by Peabody Opera Music Director JoAnn Kulesza, and have the same stage director, Jennifer Blades (responsible for last year’s magnificent Transformations), they each have a different orchestration and a different conductor, Lee Mills and Blair Skinner.

In 1952, when Trouble in Tahiti was written, the humor of recognition would have come from its contemporary aspects. It was the first flush of the American dream represented in ads from such magazines as the Saturday Evening Post. The Trio that introduce the action were up-to-the-minute popular crooners from radio commercials; their music is very much ofthe fifties. It must have come as a shock to audiences to see such a contemporary view of everyday life in the context of such a “high-art” medium as opera. Today, the opera may seem more like a period piece, yet its issues are still relevant to our busier age. Its subject is non-communication. Its main characters are a husband and wife who cannot talk to each other unless to quarrel. Except at the beginning and end, they are shown entirely in scenes in which they talk to themselves or to unseen listeners. Their only true duets are simultaneous soliloquies of regret and longing, but never shared with one another. They do end together, in a way, going off to see an escapist movie—one which the bored wife (without telling her husband) has already seen, and described to the audience in an aria that is the comic highlight of the show.

Lee Hoiby wrote This is the Rill Speaking in 1992, based on a play by Lanford Wilson, a montage of scenes from country life somewhat like Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood or Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. It is a composite of coming-of-age, slice-of-life vignettes about small town rural life in the nineteen-fifties. For city folk who might not be familiar with rills, a rill is a small stream or brook, and the play doesn’t so much follow its characters’ lives in a traditional linear narrative, but rather visits and revisits different moments in different lives. We see women discussing home decoration, schoolboys gossiping about their classmates, teenagers trying to figure out how to flirt with each other, schoolboys trying to impress one another, neighbors sharing lemonade and gossip, mothers and fathers trying to bring up responsible children…. The overall effect is familiar and distant at the same time, funny and sad, and always poignantly touching.

Photo Credits: Top right: Portion of set design by Thom Bumblauskas. Middle right: Katelyn Jackman as Dinah (photo Edward S. Davis). Bottom left: Jorge Ramírez-Sánchez as Keith and Marie Marquis as Judy (photo Edward S. Davis).


This is the Rill Speaking
Mother/Allison	Katelyn Jackman
Willy	Joseph Harrell
Judy	Marie Marquis
Maybelle/Peggy	Sonya Knussen
Tommy/Manny	David Diehl
Keith/Earl/Father	Jorge Ramírez-Sánchez

Trouble in Tahiti
Dinah	Katelyn Jackman
Sam	Peter Tomaszewski
Radio Trio	Stephanie Miller David Diehl Joseph Harrell

Peabody Chamber Opera

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