The Sounds of Silence When Deaf Characters Sing: Mallarme Music and Paradox Opera’s THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER

DURHAM, NC – What does it sound like when a person who is deaf, and mute by choice, is the central character…of a new opera?

One answer to that potentially thorny question emerged in the August 3 premiere of The Heart is A Lonely Hunter, N.C. composer Robert Chumbley and librettist Carey Scott Wilkerson‘s intriguing adaptation of Carson McCullers‘ famous 1940 novel. The concert staging, a co-production of Mallarmé Music and Paradox Opera at Durham Arts Council‘s PSI Theatre, followed two days of recording in Chapel Hill to permit distribution of the new work among the professional opera community.

Chumbley, who also conducted the performance, dedicated the premiere in a pre-performance address to Wilkerson, a Georgia-based poet, playwright, and professor of creative writing, who died unexpectedly in July. “He was a remarkable writer,” the composer said.

McCullers’ tale of existential loneliness and economic and social deprivation in a small Georgia mill town has seen adaptations before now. A 1968 film garnered Oscar nominations for actors Alan Arkin and Sondra Locke, and Rebecca Gilman’s stage adaptation toured nationally after a New York run in 2009; the BBC commissioned a radio dramatization of the novel in 2020.

But those familiar with the award-winning novel have already anticipated a major obstacle in making an opera from the work. Its central character, John Singer, an engraver at the town’s jewelry store who is strangely befriended by a number of people who live or work downtown, is deaf, as is his roommate and companion, Spiros Antonapoulos, who works at the local grocer’s. Although Singer is capable of speech, he chose to live a life of vocal silence long ago.

Adding to the difficulty, while McCullers’ omniscient narrator observes and tells us of Singer’s memories and thoughts, they’re never given direct voice in the novel outside of rare, written notes he shares with others during conversations. As a result, nearly every word Wilkerson gives him in this libretto is an invention of the artistic imagination.

(In his remarks before the performance, Chumbley noted that, in a full production of the work, Singer and Antonapoulos’s roles will likely be performed by deaf actors, signing their lines at center stage, while “strategically-placed” singers voice the words of the libretto.)

Imagination is certainly on display from the outset of the first scene, an artistic invention itself which doesn’t occur in the book. In it, Singer points out an odd chase between a mockingbird and a crow to Antonapoulos during a walk.

After the portentous opening strokes of a bass drum, collaborating pianist Anja Arko tenderly suspends the dissonant but delicate opening chords that served to frame Chumbley’s prelude. The composer’s austere evocation of a downtown street in a small Southern town resonates with the earlier urban landscapes of Copland and atmospheric moments in the incidental music Bernard Herrmann once wrote for The Twilight Zone.

Gwen Hyland’s shimmering baritone as Singer follows the musical kiting of the unlikely avian pair – a thinly disguised metaphor for Singer’s own relationship with Antonapoulos. Repeated references to the birds’ mobility and freedom are clearly intended to underscore the comparative lack of agency that the opera’s characters feel in their circumscribed lives in a backwater Southern town. It is telling when, momentarily caught up in the birds’ chase, Singer realizes, “I never thought of us in the middle of things / As friends seem ever to be / like you and me.”

Then Wilkerson and Chumbley contrast Singer’s broad-ranging thoughts with Antonapoulos’ more earthbound concerns, in the details of his boring workaday job at his despised cousin’s market. “Cake in the window. Pie on a table,” bass Miguel Pedroza flatly lists before grousing, “Cousin is owner. / Cousin is paycheck. / Cousin is liverwurst. / Cousin is day old bread.” Similar themes of alienation evince among the other characters throughout the work.

After these discontents, Singer compares the trajectory of the birds to the arabesques in his engravings: “There flows a filigree, / twirling in its curlicue / … / Such tender grace notes in silverware / Bending toward homely daily care.” As he muses, the disquiet of Chumbley’s birds on Arko’s piano cedes to the calming tectonics of earthbound domestic order. As the movement ends, the composer provides a setting for Hyland’s voice that’s as deceptively simple, stylistically, as a clean, white ceramic plate: no more than what is needed, and perfect in its unobtrusiveness and support.

As the opera unfolds, the creators’ unconventional narrative strategy comes into focus. Before the concert, Chumbley noted the intentional absence of a narrative throughline in the work. “Early on, Scott and I decided we wanted to create a series of tableaux that described the characters in the book in their relationship to Singer,” the composer said. “Rather than tell the story straight out, we did these series of tableaux scenes that, overall, will tell the story.”

Up to a point, they do. Though the hustle and bustle of the 24-hour downtown diner, the New York Café, muscles through the comic mealtime chaos in the second scene’s “Meat and Three,” tenor Leo Balkovetz also conveys the poet within its proprietor, Biff Brannon. “Far from the mills’ vast bobbin rooms,” he intones, the lives of the townspeople are woven “on many secret looms.”

An enviable economy of expression in the same scene introduces the specter of racial inequity with mezzo-soprano Jemeesa Yarborough‘s Portia, baritone Chris Fotis as charismatic but unstable drifter Jake Blount, and soprano Alissa Roca, Paradox Opera’s founder, as rambunctious 14-year-old tomboy Mick Kelly.

Chumbley’s fluid settings for Wilkerson’s water imagery here are undeniably lyrical, from the blues-tinged roil of the river that runs through the town to the crystalline droplets that accompany Mick’s wish to reach the ocean, “so far away I never need to explain myself again.”

If all of it, in another beautiful invention apart from the source material, rhapsodizes the water in a way McCullers never does, the creators return to the text in Blount’s manic Marxist diatribe, “Jake’s Rant.” Fotis infuses some old-fashioned street preaching in his character’s drunk, peevish, and wholly unsuccessful attempts to wake the mill workers to their economic subjugation.

Some of Wilkerson’s most poetic writing comes in the intertwining lyrics of the fourth scene, in the improbable exchanges on the subject of music between young Mick Kelly and Singer, who lives upstairs in her family’s boarding house. Here, Mick confides in Singer of her stealthy night-time walks across town, alone, in search of the music she can hear from strangers’ houses:

…there are windows open to the night,
and from them flows
such music as any lonely dreamer knows
the secret names of music:
Now crowding acceleration.
Now slow as bones.
Now lost in meditation.

Singer then responds, in kind:

There are windows open to my sight,
and within them glows
my own lonely dream of music,
the beauties I have known of music.
Music is my hands.
Music is the folding sky.
Music is the farthest point on the horizon.

Music is the water in Columbus fountains.
Music is the taste of harmony in my brain.
Music is the smell of honeysuckle in the spring.

At this, Kelly realizes,

…the world is a window to every blessed thing.
Mister Singer,
you can sing.

That enchantment shatters however, when the creators fumble with Mick’s skinny-dipping scene with potential first boyfriend Harry Minowitz (tenor Dylan Elza) at a countryside lake. The oblique, awkward adaptation and implausible audio setting presents the two teenagers, singing in measured, slow to medium-cadenced operatic voices, immediately after swinging from a tree limb into a cold-water pond.

The scene becomes more effective when the pair reflect on the distance between their life experiences, which will only grow after their moments of intimacy here (in a sequence of exchanged letters several scenes later, where the pair articulates an accord they never actually achieve in McCullers’ text).

As the night draws on after that, Portia and her father, overworked Black town doctor Benedict Copeland (resonant bass-baritone Langelihle Mngxati), attempt to momentarily overcome their estrangement in an evening visit, and Mick roams the residential streets in an aria whose melodic petals poetically unfold and expand on the themes she touched on in her earlier scene with Singer.

As in the novel, Dr. Copeland remains haunted by the squalid living and dying conditions of the town’s impoverished mill workers. Earlier, Wilkerson’s text invokes “rundown houses spilling sick children in the streets / And fam’lies in mills on stinking floors.” When Copeland invites Singer to join him on his rounds in the tenth scene, the clang of Chumbley’s stark chords sound the alarum of “fever rooms full of poison blood” where “ev’ryone has come down / with the raw rubbed hell of this world.”

Copeland’s contemplation of mortality as defeat is immediately contrasted with Wilkerson and Chumbley’s fantastical, elegiac “Biff’s Lament,” a setting for what seems to be a dream Brannon has of his late wife, Alice. That sense of elegy carries over into the opening of “Singer and the Death of Spiros,” whose mortality, Singer says, leaves Antonapoulos “kept…far away, held inside silence within silence.” A darker reprise of the pair’s initial songs follows, significantly leaving Singer with only the memory of his companion’s list of futile labors, and no new insights beyond the grave.

At the start of the thirteenth scene, “Final Encounters, Apotheosis,” Wilkerson has Brannon deftly frame an existential resignation in his diner’s dinner menu: “Who wouldn’t love some rice and gravy? / Who could want more? Who would dare?” Tensions build as each of the primary characters tugs at Singer, in search of the validation, connection, and meaning they’ve sought throughout McCullers’ work. Still, any supposed apotheosis here seems ironic at best, particularly when it does not alter the fatal outcome that concludes the work.

It took courage – and no small degree of calculation – for McCullers to successfully center her novel on queer characters as a writer in the 1930s. In her novel, she extensively foregrounds Singer’s wounded, single-minded devotion to (and codependent obsession with) Antonopoulos during and beyond that character’s long mental decline and institutionalization, while all expressions of physical desire remain totally eclipsed. When such desires are at least obliquely encoded – but apparently unreciprocated – in the single sexual episode Minowitz has with the androgynous and possibly asexual Kelly, he leaves town when she vows afterward that she “never will marry with any boy,” including him.

But the most direct voicing of a queer sensibility in McCullers’ novel comes as Brannon explores a more maternal, feminine subpersona within him after Alice’s death: “(W)hy was it that the smartest people mostly missed that point,” he muses. “By nature all people are of both sexes. So that marriage and the bed is not all by any means.”

When all of these go missing in this adaptation, something’s amiss. In her day, McCullers had social taboos – and the Comstock Act – to consider in depictions of queer characters and relationships that could not be too overt. It is unclear what kept Wilkerson from any unambiguous voicing of these in a 21st-century libretto.

Of course, canny directors and performers can insert these, at least to a point, in the subtexts of their performances. They also shouldn’t have to take such steps to keep these characters from being disappeared in the midst of their own stories.

More goes missing here. There’s effect without cause when we’re presented with Singer’s suicide, but not his ultimately crippling relationship with Antonopoulos that directly precipitated it. Kelly’s joyless entrée into adulthood and the abandonment of her dreams of music is absent. So are the racial injustices that threaten Copeland, cripple a son who is kept off-stage, and pressurize the novel’s scenes at the Sunny Dixie Show, a two-bit set of carnival rides where Blount works. The simmering racial tensions there ultimately lead to a brawl and a murder which forces Blount to leave town.

None of these appear. We do encounter lovely, lengthy, and dilatory digressions, in repeated meditations on a river that McCullers all but totally ignores in her text. Regrettably, these include the fantastical movement, “Biff’s Lament,” whose hallucinatory imagery and poetic power stem from somewhere – but not from the novel McCullers wrote.

For in that work, Brannon’s wife never drowns, consorts with Medusa, or dresses the dead. We search the feelings that McCullers actually records Brannon having about his wife, before and after her death, for any that can be reconciled with those Wilkerson attributes to him here. Ultimately, the movement’s compelling dark Romanticism seems to have been superimposed on the wrong novel, on the wrong continent, in the wrong century, with the wrong lovers.

When Wilkerson and Chumbley spend so much time padding their adaptation with things that never happened in McCullers novel, it feels beyond a point like they’re doing so to avoid addressing a number of things that did.

One of the central puzzles McCullers dwells on involves the nature of the townspeople’s relationships with Singer. These may well give contemporary audiences a different sense of unease than those earlier generations experienced with the work.

For Blount, Kelly, and Copeland all think they find in Singer the rarest of things in this small mill town: an empathetic soul, who listens without judgment and understands their deepest troubles. In the novel Brannon warily observes their interactions in his café, and wonders just how much Singer actually knows or cares about them all.

McCullers leaves Singer as something of an enigmatic (and oddly psychotherapeutic) dark mirror: an unfailingly polite individual who may or may not possess the nearly magical insights and depths attributed to him. Indeed, in mid-novel McCullers finally acknowledges that Singer had mostly accommodated the four because “it was better to be with any person than to be too long alone:”

At first he had not understood the four people at all. They talked and they talked—and as the months went on they talked more and more. He became so used to their lips that he understood each word they said. And then after a while he knew what each one of them would say before he began, because the meaning was always the same.

Nevertheless, Singer’s mere presence, calm attention and silence, in themselves, gives the four a therapeutic space in which they can hear, acknowledge, analyze, and validate their own concerns and feelings, on their own. To some degree, it is arguably their own self-understandings that the four wind up projecting upon Singer.

It’s unclear to what degree Wilkerson and Chumbley truly give that game away, when this Singer identifies his thoughts and feelings in luminous exchanges with Kelly and briefer, more striated words with Portia, Copeland, and others.

However, when the novel intimates that Antonopoulos’s silence may have served the same function in Singer’s relationship with him, as his does with the townspeople, the potentially addictive and destructive nature of such self-deception becomes apparent.

But when these and so many other surfaces in McCullers’ novel are barely scratched, while others remain entirely untouched, we encounter in this operatic fantasia a work with undeniable poetry and promise, but one still in need of considerable development. The hunt for a work that conveys the complexities and enigmas of McCullers’ world continues.