NYTimes article on SI opera

The tools that contemporary composers, conductors and directors are using to expand the spectacle of music can sometimes seem like unnecessary embellishments, whether video projections, acrobatics or reflecting pools of water. So the great achievement of “The Scarlet Ibis” — an outstanding new chamber opera by the composer Stefan Weisman and the librettist David Cote that opened the Prototype festival at Here on Thursday night — is not only that it’s a moving, intense and dignified creation, but also that it adds puppetry to opera’s basic elements in a completely organic way.

Mr. Weisman and Mr. Cote have taken as inspiration a James Hurst short story first published in The Atlantic in 1960 about two boys. One, Doodle, born sickly and disabled, is forcibly taught to walk, swim and climb by his brother, the narrator. One day Doodle and his family ominously see a scarlet ibis, a rare bird out of place, that falls to a graceful death. When the boys are rowing a boat that afternoon, a storm traps them. As they run home, the prideful brother leaves Doodle, made weaker by his brother’s punishing regime, to a lonely death.

In this haunting version, rewritten in the third person and set in North Carolina around World War I, both the brother’s cruelty and Doodle’s moral and emotional triumph over it are much more explicit. The result sacrifices some of Mr. Hurst’s allusive, symbolic mystery for immediate impact by elaborating the family and developing Doodle with Tom Lee’s touching puppetry, tenderly performed by Eric Avery, Josh Rice and Meghan Williams. Mallory Catlett’s thoughtful direction combines that distinct theatrical language with Eric S. Brenner’s poignant, earnest countertenor, having him sing as the young Doodle, act as puppeteer and stand in for the man Doodle never becomes. The story is inverted, less a confessional, more remembered by its precocious casualty.

The power of the victim and the special qualities of the “other” root the opera’s interrogation of what it means to be “normal.” “I’m gonna make you normal, just like me,” sings Hai-Ting Chinn in the role of Brother, a bullying brat who claims naming rights over his sibling and hurls abuse. But unlike Mr. Hurst’s story, in which Doodle is pathetic, here Doodle fights back. “I won’t be normal no more,” he insists, just before his death. Their dynamics are painful but deeply rewarding to watch.

Mr. Weisman’s emotive score, played with wonder by nine members of the American Modern Ensemble and conducted by Steven Osgood, seems occasionally as period as Andreea Mincic’s costumes. Its generous tonal lyricism develops in layers: hymns and folk songs for the household; a square, petulant simplicity for Brother’s naïve savagery; an enigmatic chromaticism for Doodle and the pathos of time. As the family, Abigail Fischer (Mother), Keith Phares (Father) and Nicole Mitchell (Auntie) all sing with power, clarity and honesty.