Opera for the Domestic Apocalypse

Dana Tanner-Kennedy

Dog Days, score by David T. Little, libretto by Royce Vavrek, and directed by Robert Woodruff, Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, New York, NY, January 9–11, 2016.

merica’s house of cards is crumbling,” sings one of the inhabitants of the ‘‘ homestead at the center of Dog Days, a new chamber opera featured at Athe 2016 Prototype Festival. “Well, you can only be on top for so long, I guess,” he shrugs. Set in the middle of a total war of unknown origins, Dog Days places a small cross-section of society under the microscope, and we watch as it dissolves before our eyes. A seemingly typical nuclear family, complete with mother, father, daughter, two sons, and a dog makes up the heart of the work. It is the kind of traditional middle-class family unit exemplary of what politi- cians refer to as the “real America,” save for the fact that the pet dog is actually a homeless man in a dog costume.

If a society can be measured by how it treats its weakest members, Dog Days—by the composer David T. Little and librettist Royce Vavrek, based on the short story by Judy Budnitz—offers a bleak vision of a sharply declining America that, in the end, fails this most basic test of human charity. When the dog-man arrives begging for food, Lisa (Lauren Worsham), the pre-adolescent daughter and moral compass of the opera, feels drawn to take care of him, and because he silently refuses to be treated as a human, she sweetly adopts him as a pet—scratching behind his ears, saving him meager table scraps, and pouring out her lonely heart to him. The man in the dog suit (John Kelly) is, despite his animal behavior, unmistakably human, a vagrant in tattered clothing with a dirty face and mat- ted hair and beard. The father (James Bobick), protective of his family and their dwindling food supply, first threatens the dog-man, sometimes shouting at him to leave, sometimes bullying him into remembering his humanity: “Listen here,

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00318 by guest on 28 September 2021 guy, / I’ll give you a change of clothes, / My clothes, / If you’d just stand up like a man.” The opera culminates in a horrific moment of offstage violence when the starving father and sons chase the dog-man out of Lisa’s arms, murder, and eat him. “Dad! / He’s a man! / You can’t —,” Lisa pleads. “He’s a dog! / He’s an animal!” shouts the father before running to hunt him down.

Critics have labeled Dog Days as “apocalyptic,” a term that conjures total ruin- ation (however vaguely), but in this case the specifically religious meaning of the term is accurate. According to Christian eschatology, the apocalypse unfolds in roughly three phases, commencing with the final cosmic war of Armaged- don and moving through the destruction of the profane world to the rise of the redeemed New Jerusalem, the shining heavenly city. Though stripped of their religious context, these three movements are immediately recognizable in the opera, which unfolds in the period between war and redemption. Dog Days marries the American theatrical preoccupation with family in extremis to the apocalyptic tradition in twentieth-century drama, bringing together strains of Shepard and Strindberg, Albee and Artaud. Given his major collaborations with Shepard, director Robert Woodruff is a natural fit for this material. In Dog Days, it is not in the cataclysm of war but in the moment that a man is slaughtered as an animal that the world truly ends. However, the work is not without a glimpse of salvation, however unorthodox.

“For pure Apocalypse,” Elinor Fuchs has observed, “no century can match the twentieth.”1 The long view of those hundred years includes unimaginable devasta- tion in every corner of the globe, and as she argues, the cataclysms and anxieties find their way into European and North American drama. At the end of her article, “The Apocalyptic Century,” Fuchs asks: “Will we find in the twentieth-first century, that twentieth-century modernism, along with the events that it both inspired and grew out of, was a vast premillennial paroxysm?” While there can be no definitive answer yet, the first two decades of this century on American soil have seemed to reel from one epic national disaster to the next. 9/11 and the “war on terror,” Hurricane Katrina, Wall Street’s role in the global financial crisis, police violence and racism’s fresh wounds, and America’s feckless responses to climatological crisis all fuel the anxieties of these past two decades. The anxieties of the domestic apocalypse are proliferating on the contemporary stage—from the conflation of politics with End-Times rhetoric in Sarah Ruhl’sPassion Play (2005) to the conflagration of middle class life in Lisa D’Amour’s Detroit (2010) and church burnings in the African-American community in Marcus Gardley’s every tongue confess (2011), to the final act of Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns: a post- electric play (2012), in which a Last Judgment-style pageant pits a Messianic Bart Simpson against Mr. Burns, the great corporate Beast.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00318 by guest on 28 September 2021 Photos: John Kelly and James Bobick in Dog Days. Photo: James Matthew Daniel. Courtesy Prototype Festival.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00318 by guest on 28 September 2021 Like the other work in this tradition, Little and Vavrek invoke apocalyptic imag- ery as a social critique of our contemporary political moment. In Dog Days war initiates the destruction of the world, but the family’s isolationism exacerbates it. At first the father binds the family through familiar rituals like saying grace over their meager dinner, which serves to reinforce the strained social fabric. But later, his insistence on self-reliance becomes pathological. Rather than escaping with extended family or traveling in search of other survivors, he demands they stay where they are. Desperate to keep control of his little kingdom, he refuses to allow a soldier to recruit his sons to help rebuild the community, though reconnecting with other survivors promises immediate food and security for the family. At the same time that the family depends on airlifted rations—presumably dropped by the government or some NGO—they balk at contributing to society. For the father, weathering the crisis alone is the noblest thing he can do, a testament to his role as head of the household and his efficacy as provider and decider. But his rigidity ultimately undoes the family and unmakes the world.

In Dog Days, the heavens exist but God is absent. For most of the production, a looped image of roiling black clouds dominates the projection screen occupying the space above the family’s home. The mediated sky bearing down on the action substitutes for the oppressive silence Budnitz creates in the short story, which is eliminated by the necessities of opera. Sometimes the noise of an overhead helicopter overtakes the score, and the first time it arrives, a crate of rations drops as if manna from heaven. The second time it drops a crate full of dust. The third time it does not stop, nor does the family look for it. No preserving or punish- ing deity intervenes in terrestrial affairs here, so the disappearance of the food is decoupled from divine judgment.

The flattened architectural logic of the home itself can be read as a two-story house with a basement all collapsed into a single horizontal plane. The parents’ bed floats strangely between the kitchen and the dining table, and the subter- ranean porn and cigarette-littered realm of the two brothers occupies the down left corner. Even the orchestra—the chamber ensemble NEWSPEAK, led by musical director Alan Pierson—abandons the pit and situates itself upstage of the kitchen sink, making its anxious music not from below the stage but from inside the family’s house. The chthonic now resides at ground level and is loosed upon the earth.

Pat (Peter Tantsits) and Elliot (Michael Marcotte), the two delinquent brothers referred to as both “stupid” and “savage,” offer the opera’s first vision of a New Jerusalem. Together they weave a pot-fueled adolescent fantasy of the endless sex they will be required to have in order to repopulate the earth. As progenitors of the new world, they imagine the “row after row of heaving breasts” and the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00318 by guest on 28 September 2021 “empty bodies that need to be filled” to begin the human race anew. The soldier, attempting to recruit the boys, offers a more traditional version of the redeemed world. She encourages the hope of a bright future if the father will only allow them to come together with others: “there’s a new community / Waiting to come together / To celebrate, to rebuild.” The soldier preaches a gospel of collectivism. “Like the great phoenix, we’ll be reborn,” she says. But the father refuses and condemns them to isolation. There will be no shining city. The remade world of Dog Days, if there is to be one at all, will be an island peopled with Calibans.

The title Dog Days, aside from referring to the dog-man of the play, points to a specific period during the late days of summer—mid-July to mid-August—when the sun occupies the same position in the sky as the dog star Sirius. In his col- lection of calendrical lore, nineteenth-century author John Brady writes that the ancients met the sultry months with the sacrifice of a dog to appease angry temperatures: “[T]hey would seem to have believed [the star’s] power of heat, conjoined with that of the sun, to have been so excessive, that on the morning of its first rising the Sea boiled, the Wine turned sour, Dogs grew mad, and all other creatures became languid; causing man, among other diseases, burning fevers, hysterics, and phrensies.”2 In Brady’s description, the hottest part of the year takes on its own kind of apocalyptic grandeur, complete with an angry deity inflicting madness on the earth. Dog Days’s vacillation between two extremes of temperature seems only fitting in our current crisis of global warming and unpredictable weather patterns. The first half of the opera takes place in the summer in indefinitely long and excruciatingly hot temperatures, but the second half offers an altogether different vision. Like the fin-de-siècle apocalypse of choice, which was a worldwide ice age caused by the death of the sun, the second half of Dog Days moves from the torturous summer heat into winter, in which the family finally sits immobile, slowly freezing to death. The penultimate scene is entitled “Endgame,” and until the dog-man’s murder, the action winds down into a stasis reminiscent of Beckett’s play. Like Nell in her ashbin, the mother (Marnie Breckenridge), while stretched out to rest on the dining room table, dies without anyone noticing.

After the snarling pack runs off to kill and eat the dog-man, Lisa, left alone on stage, stands in a daze, and so begins the moment that so unsettled the reviewer Steve Smith. Slowly she shuffles to the sink, takes a bucket, and turns on the faucet. But it is dry. She walks to the body of her mother laid out on the table, and the music begins to crescendo slowly. Lisa unties her mother’s robe. Bereft of water for even a makeshift funerary rite, Lisa discreetly urinates into the bucket and uses the liquid to lovingly and painstakingly wash the body of her mother. Unclean as her own bodily fluids may be, she is compelled towards ceremony,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00318 by guest on 28 September 2021 prizing the necessity of this most fundamental of human rituals above propriety. Paleoanthropologists measure the appearance of organized civilization by the evidence of purposeful burial of the dead, and in Lisa lives the last remnants of dignity, faith, and responsibility to the other.

The three men stagger back into the kitchen full of meat—bloodied, satiated, and feral. The image of the men’s full bellies clashes with Lisa’s private act of emptying herself, an act fundamental to religious philosophies of self-sacrifice. The men sit dead-eyed and lumpen on the floor as Lisa reties her mother’s robe. The orchestra, continuing its crescendo, begins to verge on deafening. Her ablu- tions complete, Lisa wraps herself in extra clothing and winds her way through the orchestra. Now the thunderous and prolonged cacophony shakes the seats and walls of the theater, underscoring Lisa’s final act as she throws open the door and walks out into the biting air. The translucent back wall brightens and glows until the music stops and the lights snap to black.

The twenty-first century American apocalypse ofDog Days leaves aside millenarian dread for a stealthier end of the world that occurs when societies forget the vast obligation that individuals bear to one another. Lisa, a child at the start, grows up, discovering in herself a humility reserved for the likes of saints. Not even she knows where she will venture when she leaves, but better to risk death than live among savages. But if the redeemed world lives in Lisa, who goes forth into almost certain death, then it is the murderers and not the meek who inherit the earth. There is no hand of God to separate the good from the wicked, and the audience is left alone with men, who are now no better than beasts.

NOTES 1. Elinor Fuchs, “The Apocalyptic Century,” Theater 29.3 (1999), 7.

2. John Brady, Clavis Calendaria: Or, A Compendious Analysis of the Calendar, Illustrated with Ecclesiastical, Historical and Classical Anecdotes (London: Nichols, Son and Bentley, 1815), 87–89.

DANA TANNER-KENNEDY is a doctoral candidate at Yale School of Drama, a freelance dramaturg, and a sessional instructor in the drama department at the University of Alberta, Canada.

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