Opera Theatre of Saint Louis’ New Works Collective is not your grandmother’s opera about a dying French courtesan. New Works not only reinvents opera, New Works is the future of opera. For its second season at Opera Theatre of St. Louis, the New Works Collective tackles three contemporary issues in bite-size pieces of 20 minutes each.
“These operas speak to the way people are now,” says librettist Marianna Mott Newirth, who wrote the lyrics to Mechanisms, a study in neurodiversity about the different ways the brain processes information.
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Most of us know about dyslexia, which causes difficulty reading. Mechanisms portrays another neurodivergence. In it, Roe, a fifth grader with synesthesia, struggles with math because she sees numbers as colors. She’s bullied by classmates and reprimanded by her teacher. Roe is miserable. Only her father believes she’s not stupid.
Newirth understands her plight. Diagnosed as a child with dyscalculia, a learning disability that makes it difficult to process numbers, she had to learn arithmetic a different way. “Long division didn’t make sense. I’d done a year of ballet, so my math tutor laid out masking tape on the floor as long division and told me to turn it into a dance,” Newirth says. It worked.
“Having a learning disability doesn’t stop me,” she says. Newirth co-founded Opera Praktikos, New York City’s first disability-affirmative opera company, which “seeks to build on the strengths people have.”
In another of the New Works Collective productions, On My Mind, Melodee and Lyric separately walk into a convention at a hotel. Each is subjected to little humiliations during the meet-and-greet because they are Black and female. Each feels alone, because she is. Each flees to the hotel bar. They meet and click. Each offers the other empathy and support—and hope. They return home to their separate cities and stay in touch, creating a life-long sisterhood.
“When we, minority women, come into contact with each other, we have the ability to be seen. Often others perceive us as less than. Some of it is classism, too,” says Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton, librettist for On My Mind. “There are very few Black women on the creative side of opera. There hasn’t been space for us.”
D.E.E.P. stands for “Determined to Excel in Everything Possible,” which Mouton is doing. She is Houston’s first Black poet laureate emeritus, and, last year, she published her memoir, Black Chameleon: Memory, Womanhood and Myth, to rave reviews in The New York Times, Ms., and NPR.
If you’re very ill, it takes everything you have just to make it through the day. Imagine being near death and a mother of three children, as Grace is in the final New Works production, Unbroken. She worries what will happen to her young sons and wants to prepare them for the worst. Yet, she wants them to see life as a glorious adventure not a journey of grief. She and her sister Susan work with her boys, especially Ezra, the eldest, who must help raise his younger brothers.
Together, the three works represent a collection of important stories, chosen for audiences by a panel of St. Louis artists, advocates, and local leaders.
As director Kimille Howard wrote in her recent blog for OTSL, “These three powerful, diverse stories have been crafted with love, reverence, and conviction by artists aiming to start new conversations through opera. Through these three important works, I hope audiences feel moved, welcomed, and eager for more.”
The New Works Collective runs March 14-16 at Kirkwood Performing Arts Center (210 E. Monroe). Tickets are available at opera-stl.org.
