Tan Dun's "Tea' by the Opera Company (1st review)

At intermission of Opera Company of Philadelphia's production of Tan Dun's Tea: A Mirror of Soul, I stepped outside to let the cold air wake me and overheard one smoker ask another, "Did it end already?" Considering the parade of patrons departing in droves, you couldn't blame him for wondering.

To be sure, Act I of this much-anticipated East Coast premiere began magically. Initially, Dun's opera—a love triangle that plays out during a quest for a book of wisdom—reduced everyone in the audience to children sitting around a fire.

Drew Billiau's ever-evocative lighting design illuminated the exquisite asceticism of Rumi Matsui's monastery set, which, like a pop-up book unfolding on the stage, later morphed into a cherry-blossom-covered cube and the mammoth stones of mountains. Masatomo Ota capped the bursting color of his costumes with crowns of antlers, flowers and fins that rested on the singers' heads like miniature sculptures. Computer-animated monkeys danced behind a screen; percussionists roved through the aisles; and monks growled out their chants to a low, rumbling bass.

Throughout, Dun's composition featured his signature inventive percussionation (demonstrated previously in his Water Concerto and Paper Concerto) to mesmerizing effect. A chorus tore sheets of paper or pounded on floor-to-ceiling-length banners to symbolize wind rushing through trees, or they clapped stones in their hands to intensify a swordfight. Meanwhile, three remarkable onstage percussionists shook liquid-filled glass tubes, played bowls of water like a drum, or took us in and out of a monk's reverie by raining down percussive sounds through a sieve.

A far cry from Verdi

But Tea lacks a great deal of what Opera Company audiences"“ their tastes bloated by a diet of Verdi and Puccini— are accustomed to digesting. Dun highlights his story with powerful motifs but includes no arias and few otherwise melodic structures. And while the score's filmic quality occasionally creates a rich and complex emotional tapestry for each scene, in most of them he fails to weave it into the story.

Dun's libretto (co-written with Xu Ying) attempts to carve every line into poetry. Some of these evoke metaphor (two lovers asking, "Who is the tree, who is the choking vine?"); others trigger unintended laughter ("drink in the bitterness of the black dragon oolong"). Elongated phrasings gave the singers— particularly Roger Honeywell's impressive and clear tenor— a chance to exercise their voices. But then, so do scales.

In the lovers' quest for wisdom from the "Book of Tea," Dun devotes the opera's entire second act to an abstract exploration of "tea as metaphor" for everything (even a strikingly conjured scene dealing with "tea as sex"). And that was after so many people left at intermission.

The bowl of memory

But those who left missed out on the real rarity— even in opera— of total theater. Operaphiles may admire certain elements of an opera— the musicality, the rendering and melody of a memorable aria or clever libretto, the singing, or the set and lighting. Tea needed every production element to come off perfectly for its impact to succeed so staggeringly. And it did.

In a singular, gelling scene change, the metaphor of the opera's opening— why do you drink from an empty bowl?— unfolded from the story's sober, contemplative process to hit like a Eureka moment of pure despair. Ultimately, Dun's ending reminds us of the dark moments in which we all drink from— or drown in— the empty bowl of memory.

As for those patrons who couldn't tame their impatience long enough to stick around for the finale? They won't have even an empty bowl to drink from.♦


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To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.
To read another review by Lesley Valdes, click here.