In a new collaboration between acclaimed French playwright and director Pascal Rambert and Mercury Chamber Orchestra’s Artistic Director Antoine Plante, LOVE mixes live Baroque music performances with a theatrical representation of a funeral. But this service is set in modern-day Houston, juxtaposing raw contemporary interior monologues of grieving family members with the transcendent beauty of elegiac Baroque musical performances.
The combination of the artistic musical forms of the past, featuring period instruments and compositions by Purcell, Dowland, and Tallis, and the intense confessional thoughts directed by each character to the deceased might seem jarring at first. But connecting these disparate elements serves to underscore the work’s themes of the timelessness of loss, memory, and love. Rambert’s creation is a reminder that these difficult thoughts and emotions are experienced with radically different coping mechanisms and responses—even by siblings raised in the same family. Yet that does not diminish their powerful presence, regardless of the form of their expressions.
With patrons invited to place a rose in vases on stage to memorialize a loved one who has passed away before the performance starts, the show feels more immersive than traditional chamber orchestral productions. With a coffin surrounded by white flowers dominating the stage, this show starts feeling like something new right away: you aren’t just watching a theatrical production with music. You are attending someone’s funeral.
As the 70-minute uninterrupted production progresses, the intimate feeling of watching this drama is intensified by the characters performing their impressively delivered and emotionally wrenching lyrics right next to some of the audience members—creating a striking and memorable experience.
The narrative arc focuses on a family dealing with a tragic death in Houston. A respected artist and voice teacher (Baritone Mark Diamond, who in real life also excels in operatic and choral music, and teaches at Baylor University) has died in a car accident. His funeral has an open casket, but it is the delivery of buried emotions that are central.
His devastated widow (a convincing Sarah Mesko) and their two daughters (Sopranos Len Torrie and Donna Bella Litton) reveal the conflicts and miscommunications that the family endured in spoken monologues that are accompanied by such searing and other-worldly musical performances that transport understandably swirling and stuttering monologues into outstanding musical expressions of their suffering. Rambert dramatizes how we need both—the rawness of the real-time moment, but the timeless transcendence of great art.
This show is new and innovative and full of surprises. There is even a choir of young children (directed by Karen Reeves) singing at this funeral, and they really do seem like angels. Their songs serve as a shift from intense suffering to the hope of solace. This is a necessary balm: the dead father has left behind some unanswered questions, and there was some hazy but palpable turmoil in this family.
But like the father’s lost cell phone, there is no way to know everything about what was going on with him. But maybe that is the point: after so much loss, there can be so much love. Love is what fills in those fissures and gaps.
The novelty of this form is striking, and Torrie’s haunting performance is impossible to forget. This ensemble deftly demonstrates in both word and song how families experience each other from such contrasting perspectives. And this production is a wonderful way to experience contemporary drama and Baroque music in an unusual and innovative way.
But this creative new show does not diminish the superlative musicianship of Jonathan Godfrey (Violin), Antoine Plante (Gamba), Caroline Nicolas (Gamba), Hector Torres Gonzalez (Theorbo/Lute), and Martin Jones (Organ) that keep audiences enthralled. These performers may be playing behind the theatrical drama, but their stellar sounds steal the show.
The final performance is scheduled for 8 p.m. Saturday, March 21 at the Hobby Center’a Zilkha hall, 800 Bagby. For more information, call 713-533-0080 or visit mercuryhouston.org. $27.50 and up.