Atom Egoyan's 2008 film Adoration was an odd and convoluted tale arising from the cultural trauma of the still recent September 11th attacks. The story involved an American adolescent relating the details of his Palestinian father's failed attempt at getting a bomb onto a transatlantic flight and his teacher, a Lebanese immigrant, taking an undue interest in the possibly fabricated story.
It arrives as a surprise some 15 years later to have the story resurrected as an opera with music by Mary Kouyoumdjian, herself an Armenian immigrant whose grandparents had sought refuge in Lebanon. The retelling, directed by Laine Rettmer to a libretto by Royce Vavrek, received its premiere performances at the Sheen Center for Thought & Culture as a part of the Prototype Festival.
The show benefited from a strong cast. As the adolescent Simon, Omar Najmi employed a wonderfully conversational tenor with spare vibrato, befitting his blue jeans and hoodie. The intense focus of his facial expressions sold him in the key role. Miriam Khalil as his teacher, Sabine, has a soaring soprano that trembled with emotion. Marc Kudisch, as the grandfather and keeper of family history, brought a baritone profundo that was authoritative and sometimes intimidating.
This new staging follows the movie closely, but with a somewhat stricter chronology, erasing some of the unnecessary mysteries of the movie. Flashbacks are mostly told through video, presumably live-streamed from behind the set, inventively projected onto surfaces at different angles on the spare and flexible stage.
In Kouyoumdjian’s score, a beautiful, if too brief, a cappella duet by Simon and Sabine was especially memorable, and there were nice touches throughout, such as the string quartet playing an artful interpolation of Greensleeves in a seasonally appropriate scene. Having the quartet off-stage and amplified (all of the singers used headset microphones as well) and with a fair bit of the action taking place on video (even if performed live), made for an opera with distractions. As a stage play, though, as simple storytelling, it worked well.
But it was nevertheless a weird story, unbalanced and ultimately unsatisfying. The duplicitous Sabine, who passes herself off in hijab and veil as a passing stranger to get a look at her student’s home life, overtakes the story of Simon’s online testimonials about his father, which means preposterousness eclipses intrigue in both the film and the opera. Presumably, the opera is set in the early 2000s, as was the film (at least, there’s nothing indicating otherwise). Still, having a visit to Israel as a plot point in the flashbacks complicates the story in early 2024. Of course, the opera was in pre-production before the current conflagration, but nevertheless, terrorism is a pretty loaded subject to take on. Making it a knot in a tangled array of convoluted plot twists, however well sung, seems strange, if not altogether cold.
