Philly Fringe 2024: Liberty City Arts presents Erwartung

Hitting highs and lows

Schönberg’s half-hour monodrama places fiendish vocal and dramatic demands on its soloist. In an unbroken monologue, the performer, identified only as Woman, descends into mental ruin as she wanders a dark forest, convinced she has discovered the dead body of her lover. The composer and his librettist, Marie Pappenheim, drew from the symbolic language of the Expressionist movement emerging around them, and Schönberg’s daunting score requires frequent leaps between registers and tempos. Simply getting through a performance feels like an accomplishment—succeeding is a feat.

Well, O’Toole mostly succeeded. She threw herself fearlessly into the music, maintaining an admirable evenness of tone as the score took her through vocal extremes high and low. Her bright, penetrating timbre suggested the Woman’s gradual decline as she became more obsessed with the specter of her object of affection. Singing in German, she managed crisp diction that often rendered the projected subtitles perfunctory.

O’Toole possesses a powerful instrument—sometimes too powerful for the space. (The performances take place in a rehearsal area at Pig Iron Theatre Company’s complex on North 2nd Street.) She often sang at forte when piano would have made more sense, including from an interpretive standpoint. O’Toole also remained hidebound to her music stand, which occasionally caused pianist Ting Ting Wong to follow her tentatively. In many isolated interludes, though, Wong made a distinctive impression in the composer’s own reduction of the score.

To call this Erwartung staged would be generous; in many ways, it resembled a do-it-yourself recital. (No director was listed, and program notes referenced a dancer who never materialized.) Still, Liberty City Arts created a memorable artistic experience not just with the performance, but by showcasing the works of local painters and craftspeople, which were available for purchase on a pay-what-you-decide basis. The overall impression aligned with the company’s mission to “unite passionate art enthusiasts and artists through transformative experiences that impact the city’s cultural landscape.”