Years ago I taught a class with Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale on the syllabus and received a paper from a student that began, roughly, with the observation that “this is a novel about how women were treated in the ‘80s.”
In fact, Atwood’s novel—though published in 1985—imagined a future society in which the decade’s religious right had taken over the government, and fundamentally examines the abuse of power. All this to say, The Righteous, which had its world premiere July 13 at the Santa Fe Opera, mines some of the same terrain (minus the dystopia).
The opera, from composer Gregory Spears with libretto by former US Poet Laureate Tracy K Smith, opens in 1979 in the Southwest United States, as oil magnate/budding politico Paul (bass-baritone Greer Grimsley) turkey hunts with his friend CM (tenor Brenton Ryan), son Jonathan (countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo) and Jonathan’s best friend David (baritone Michael Mayes), a minister. The scene sets in motion Paul’s gubernatorial ambitions; Jonathan’s possibly unrequited romantic love for David; and David’s plans to marry Jonathan’s sister Michele (mezzo soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano). Turkeys are shot.
“The mess is half the price,” Jonathan tells David about the bloodied fowl, providing a lasting metaphor for the opera’s examination of the human condition, and the opera itself at times.
Act 1 also introduces army serviceman Eli (tenor Andrew Turner) as he tells his wife Sheila (soprano Elena Villalón), to her dismay, that he will soon be heading overseas.
Spears and Smith conceived of the opera in part as a loose retelling of the story of King David from the Bible, in which their David’s ambitions clash with his religious faith amid three large social issues of the late ‘70s through the early ‘90s: the AIDS crisis, the so-called “war on drugs” and the rise of feminism.
His friendship and professed love for Jonathan should be enough for David to preach compassion for the era’s AIDS victims but he does not do so, nor does he understand how the war on drugs is hurting poorer communities of color. He taps Sheila to lead a women’s group, but does so in a patronizing fashion.
By the second act, David has begun an affair with Sheila, who has revealed the abuse she sustained as a child. Michele senses she’s losing her husband and then loses her father, Paul, to a heart attack. David, at CM’s request, runs as governor in a special election and wins the seat. Flash forward to 1990, David and Sheila are governor and first lady, and he has grown even more conservative in his views, putting him in a tense clash with his stepdaughter Shannon (soprano Jazmine Saunders). Sheila doesn’t abide her husband’s politics either, and goes to try to help at the women’s shelter, where she encounters David’s first wife Michele, now a lawyer for the shelter. The two women make peace—Michele is clearly better off without David—and Sheila begins to try to help other women.
If this sounds like a lot of moving parts for director Kevin Newbury, it was, and most of those moving parts coincide with moving sets. This became obtrusive and, at one point, a moving wall actually banged into a character (I don’t think this was an intentional “breaking of the fourth wall” site gag). That being said, the scenic design (Mimi Lien), as well as the costume design (Devario Simmons), coupled with the various televised projections tracking with the changes in political eras (think Carter, Reagan, Bush) create a resonant sense of the opera’s time and place writ large, while the use of the actual landscape as a backdrop underscores the story’s particular placement in the American Southwest.
Smith has spoken of her decision to use the repetitive poetic form of the villanelle to mirror the repetitive nature of the Book of Psalms, for which the biblical King David is traditionally credited. These appear in the opera’s numerous arias, several of which are heartbreakingly beautiful, such as Sheila’s aria about emptiness, which Villalón performed exquisitely to thunderous applause. Other stand-outs include Cano’s Michele and once again bass-baritone Nicholas Newton (appearing this season in Don Giovanni as Leporello) as Jacob, a young Black preacher who argues in vain with David about the negative impacts of the war on drugs in his community. Jacob’s aria also stood out as a moment in which the underlying dissonance between the orchestral music and the arias sounded less pronounced. Despite an abundance of arias, at points the opera felt overly recitative (and marks the first time I have heard anyone sing about write-in candidates).
While the orchestra overall performed with both gusto and precision, I periodically had trouble hearing the singers over the instruments (conducted by Jordan De Souza in his SFO debut). In his review for the Santa Fe New Mexican, Mark Tiarks advises that sitting on the theater’s right side may provide a better aural experience as many of the large orchestra’s brass instruments are on the left; I was on the left in the front.
In preview discussions, Spears spoke about the duality of opera balancing the “play” or story, with the otherworldliness of the music (I’m paraphrasing). In The Righteous, the story—or my critiques of it, at any rate—overpowered the music at several instances.
Still, at the end, where the chorus (powerful and well used throughout under the direction of chorus master Susanne Sheston) take up David’s final aria/psalm, their voices rising in both pain and exultation, capturing the universal truth of Smith’s opening stanza:
“Life is long and wisdom slow
I thought I knew
What did I know?”
The Righteous
Music by Gregory Spears
Libretto by Tracy K. Smith
8:30 pm, July 17, 26; 8 pm, July 30, Aug. 7, Aug. 13
Seated ticket prices range from $37 to $409. SRO is $15. First time buyers with New Mexico ID can receive 40% off a pair of tickets. Call or visit the Box Office for the most up to date information and pricing, or visit santafeopera.org. Use the promo code 2024RIGHTEOUS for a 35% on any performance.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated this was Newbury’s SFO debut. SFR regrets the error.