Space Opera

by Michael Kandel

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With an ominous, growling fanfare the scene opens at the marble palace at Ghewi, the Creeth capital. In the original production at the presidential palace in Belize, the set was based on ancient photographs of the marble government buildings in Washington, D.C., which must have complemented nicely the atmosphere of doom and lost empire. The triumphant bints are assembled in full panoply. Darg Bhar is in chains though he still wears his furs. The grease apes are in chains behind him. Miranda is in chains beside Petro, who is chained too though he was the traitor. General Wricob sits on a throne above the multitude, rubbing his hands and gloating. Prowlux sings to Bea, who is also in chains, though her chains are delicate and of gold, "Convert to bintism, human woman, and I will spare you." She sings, "I belong to Bhar. You're wasting your time." At this point, Davidson pulls yet another surprise from his theatrical sleeve, mixing tragedy and slapstick — and this at the very crux of the drama! — a bold masterstroke that undoubtedly left the contemporary critics gasping, sputtering, not knowing whether to admire or condemn. Not knowing, indeed, what to think. The action is condensed into a few seconds. A soldier steps forward, pulls off his helmet, and shakes out his hair. It is Buyda, and she holds a dagger. At the exact same moment, a hooded woman emerges from the crowd on the other side, holding a vial. It is, of course, Leila Ziff-Calder. Both women, in perfect symmetry, have chosen this time and place to do away with their competition. Remarkably, the composer accompanies with stubborn, total silence the carefully choreographed action that follows, as if we are watching mime. Perhaps Davidson is suggesting that we are all naught but programmed stick-figure puppets of our desires and fears. Again, this is one of Windburn's themes, though put on its head: for Windburn claimed, until his ashram days, that we were not puppets ("Wir sind nicht Puppen!") but, rather, exercised free will. Buyda closes in and frenziedly bosom-stabs as Leila Ziff-Calder simultaneously pulls back Bea's head by the hair and empties the contents of the vial into her throat. But lo! the serrated bronze ceremonial bint blade and the supertoxic cis-methylated ligands from Doctor Cabrini's laboratory are powerless against Bobby's sister: because of Darg Bhar's nocturnal, unspeakable tampering with her hereditary material she is no longer human, perhaps no longer even living in the traditional sense. Bobby struggles against his chains to defend her but shrinks back with horror when he realizes that his sister is no more, though no more in a way different from the way in which he had first thought she was no more. It is a scene full of bitter and grisly irony, where both success and defeat have lost their meaning. Bea does not bleed from the wound, does not fall from the poison. Instead she sings, "I find this all very tedious." "This is your work, Bhar!" Bobby screams. Bhar turns to him and sings, in a cut-time inversion of the Leila Ziff-Calder revenge motif, what is surely one of the most chillingly cynical arias ever written: "I have slept with so many women, so many men, so many different creatures both terrestrial and not. I have slept with close family members, with infants, and with decaying corpses. I needed something new." Somehow we are not surprised that the ghost of Doctor Cabrini appears, hovering over the assemblage. He sings, to a stately Japanese drum, "This is what happens when we indulge the flesh, with no thought to our better destiny. This is the madness that happens." The chorus of combined bints and chained humans sings, in deceptively complex twelve-tone chords: "What will become of the human race if it does not give thought to its immortal soul?" The finale is all in C major and stolid quarter-notes, we hear organ music in the background, and the horns give full throat to their power, as if we were at a wedding of Norse gods in a cathedral so vast, its vault shimmers in mist. Though at the same time, almost as a kind of contrapuntal footnote, Bea and Chuck go off together, hand-in-hand, to faint disco music, no doubt to plug themselves into some screen in some arcade offstage. Their departure is barely noticed. In a sense, they were not there in the first place. Thus does Harold Davidson conclude his magnum opus with a Sunday sermon instead of with wailing and mayhem, thereby breaking the most sacred of the rules of opera. "Only one murder, and only one ghost," complained Alberta Quire of the San Diego Times. "How is it, then, that this work is nevertheless so disturbingly moving?" We might answer her querulous question with the words of Windburn, who once remarked, in his Meditations As the Sun Sets, "What is really awful in human affairs is what is unseen. The misdeed itself is nothing, a trifle, compared to the thought that sired it." Perhaps Davidson, engaged in so strenuous and prolonged a polemic with his great teacher, in the end could not help but agree with him. As the curtain falls, a grand orchestral coda hammers with relentless Lutheran piety one note, on and on, until the audience, at last beginning to understand, finally leaves piecemeal, a gentleman rising and putting on his coat here, a lady collecting her gloves and scarf there. The hammering continues until the auditorium is empty, and we are reminded of the hammer blows in the spaceship bodyshop at Vuffon. For what did those honest, simple hammers do but remove — or attempt to remove — imperfections in what was once an unblemished, shining, and perfect surface? [ THE END ] BACK TO OMNI FICTION ARCHIVES