The Medium
Tulsa Opera
Studio 308
Oct. 19, 2023
If you’re like me, the word “opera” conveys a strange series of feelings including fear, longing, and a vague unease: Why, exactly, do they hold those notes so long? And to what ominous purpose? Reader, I grew up in an Oklahoma town of 2,000, where there was scarcely a concert to be enjoyed, much less anything resembling opera.
All this I present as an explanation for the fact that Tulsa Opera’s sold-out run of The Medium, performed last weekend, was the first opera I have ever seen in my life of three decades and change. I write you as, if not a fully changed person, at least one a little more convinced.
This wasn’t a conventional big-stage, big-horned-hat production, but something different for TO: an intimate experience of an art form that can be, shall we say, intimidating. This two-nights-only performance of Gian Carlo Menotti’s 1946 work, at the tiny Studio 308 in the East End Village, was held in the round (meaning the audience surrounds the stage on multiple sides) and I sat close enough that I could have touched the actors — if I wasn’t so scared of them.
Mary Ann Stewart held the crowd’s attention as “Madame Flora,” a con-artist psychic who pulls in grieving parents and convinces them that the voices they hear during her regular seances are those of their dead children. In fact, the voices (and the moving lights and shaking furniture that accompany them) are created by Madame Flora’s daughter, Monica (Bree Nichols) and the mute child that they’ve taken in, Toby (Justin Tomlinson). Stewart and Nichols gave brilliant vocal as well as acting performances, and thrilled as they enacted the terrifying dance of mother and daughter turned against each other by circumstances.
And the circumstances are dire. In Madame Flora’s spare apartment (little more than a table, chairs, liquor cabinet, and a hiding place for Monica and Toby to enact their fake ghostly hoots), the imitation seance begins to fall apart when an actual spectral presence asserts itself against Madame Flora’s throat: Toby, the silent, adopted child, is the obvious suspect. The music, at first lilting and harmonious, begins to turn dissonant, breaking into post-modern scraps of melodies as the family falls apart to the tune of Flora’s heavy drinking and violence. (Props to the prop designer Ben Johnson: when Flora breaks open a wine bottle to threaten Toby, it shatters convincingly enough to fool us into believing it’s glass, not plastic.) And the costumes, which start lush and full in their bohemian splendor, soon start to sag and shred as Monica and Toby experience the full brunt of their matriarch’s paranoia.
I’m not sure what scared me so much about opera, but it certainly wasn’t the right stuff: the intensity of Stewart’s performance, so close to my face, will stay with me for months. I’ve always had this weird idea that all opera was in Italian, which is dumb, but honest (this hour-long show was, handily enough, in English). I’ve also always had the idea that opera would be boring: this was anything but. I urge you, if you haven’t seen anything that Tulsa Opera has done, go ahead and get some tickets now. It’s probably not what you think.
Next at Tulsa Opera: Benefit Concert with Sarah Coburn, December 2
