Introducing the 5th Annual Fresh Squeezed Ounce of Opera showcase winners Eva Conley Kendrick (composer) and Mark Harvey Levine (librettist), creators of the micro-opera Misfortune, in its Regional Premiere.
Performing and producing new works by living composers and librettists offers artists the opportunity for real-time communication. After spending time with the scores and their characters, cast members Maureen Broy Papovich, Jake Jacobsen and Julia Watkins-Davis had these questions for the creators:
What is your interpretation of what goes on in this story? Is there something supernatural at work here with these cookies? Were they meant for Barry?
Eva Conley Kendrick [ECK]: Mark will be the one to answer this but I like to think there is something supernatural at work here.
Mark Harvey Levine [MHL]: There is definitely something supernatural at work here — I always like a little touch of magic in my plays. As to the last question — well, that’s answered at the end.
Were you drawn to this story or inspired by it based on a personal experience?
ECK: I have had many eerie coincidences occur in my life, and at least one has involved a fortune cookie. I did get the same fortune cookie two nights in a row at two different Chinese restaurants on two different sides of San Francisco, when I lived there. Possibly the most eerie coincidence occurred many years ago when my family and i were dropping my sister off at the Boston Amtrak at South Station to go seek her fortune as a cartoon animator on the TV show Animaniacs, where she’d just been hired. We discovered that our car had been towed. In my 14 year old despair I turned to my sister and said “I wish Paul S_____” was here. Paul was an opera singer I’d worked in the summer before and just happened to be the first person who came to my mind because he was the only person I knew who lived in Boston (actually, I discovered later he actually lived in Revere but worked in Boston). No sooner than the words were uttered, my sister and I looked up the road and there was Paul S_____ strolling towards us. He helped my parents locate the lot where our car had been towed to and he snuck us through the turnstile to get to the train with his pass which was helpful since my parents just had about enough money to get the car out of the lot. So Paul did save the day after all, and did I summon him with my words? Was it the biggest coincidence ever in a city with a population over 600K? Maybe…we’ll never know, just like the fortune cookie.
MHL: I’ve drawn from personal experience — I’ve eaten at a lot of Chinese restaurants. I love Chinese restaurants. Anything can happen at a Chinese restaurant.
The weirdest coincidence that ever happened to me ALSO took place in Boston. Why do these things always happen in Boston? I was visiting a friend there, and wanted to cross the street. As I stepped off the corner, I saw a vehicle coming out of the corner of my eye, so I jumped up back onto the curb so I wouldn’t get run over.
The vehicle was a hearse. A hearse with my name on it.
“Levine”, it said, in big letters on the side.
Question for Eva Conley Kendrick: I’ve always wondered how a composer goes about setting conversational texts. It seems so tricky!
ECK: In setting texts I think of the natural rhythm of the spoken phrase and also the dramatic intent behind the words. If I was setting a sentence of text to music and it was uttered as a question, a statement or an exclamation, I would set the sentence musically three different ways. The register—or the range of how high or low it would fall in the singers voice—also depends on the mood or dramatic intent. If someone is demanding something, for example, it would probably be lower and louder, more assertive, whereas if someone was wheedling, it would be higher and softer, just as it would be if it were spoken. I greatly enjoy writing recitative sections of music or the sung dialogue sections because it can transport a commonplace or intense conversation into an operatic world of sound.
Question for Mark Harvey Levine: I see that on your website, you are a playwright. How is writing a libretto different for you? It seems as though it would be a very different style.
MHL: I would think it would be a different style to write one, but Eva was incredibly generous. See, “Misfortune” is a ten minute play of mine. I thought she was going to ask for all sorts of changes, cuts and rewrites to turn it into an Opera. But no, she simply set it to her wonderful music, without asking me to change anything. I was very grateful.
Watch this preview with the cast of Misfortune!