From Sage to Stage, Part II

Wanted: Gorgeous Canyon, for Singing and Violence

“So far, I think it’s going pretty well,” artist Ed Mell reports from his Phoenix studio. In Grey’s original novel, the land itself is a character. And Mell, Arizona’s foremost landscape artist, was recruited to bring it to life.

“We have pretty much designed the Surprise Canyon scene,” he says. The canyon is the story’s hidden Eden, where Riders’ embattled rancher/heroine Jane and the gunman, Lassiter, square off against their Mormon enemies. The set will blend Mell’s angular majesty with impressive physical sprawl: “Fifty-four-feet wide, with 25-foot cliff faces near the audience,” he says. “And you’ll get this sense of the canyon opening up as the characters approach. It’s a pretty neat effect.”

The challenge of putting vast horizons between Symphony Hall’s exit signs so intrigued Mell that, at 73, he agreed to become a scenic designer for the first time. He has risen to the challenge, coordinating his images with the technical needs of sightlines, acoustics and scenery pieces. 

“It’s a learning process. We have to tell the story, and I need input to do it correctly. But I’ve got good people to keep me on the right road.” From here, he’ll design moveable pieces – like the Mormon church and the Withersteen Ranch – that extend his distinctive look down to the stage floor. “When we get to the more ethereal stuff, like the stampede, that’s going to be real collaborative.”

Oh, yeah. Did we mention there’s a stampede in Riders? It comes between the shootouts and the avalanche. Opera is a medium where emotions run high. And Zane Grey puts a lot of cowboys in the room. When you bring all that together, you’re going to lose your security deposit.

So how will the opera’s designers fuse the mayhem with the majesty? 

“Well, we’re not putting cows onstage,” Mell says with a chuckle. “They make a mess of everything.”

While the specifics are still “evolving,” Riders videographer Kristin Atwell hints that the opera’s runaway herd will combine digital effects and old-fashioned stagecraft. “We’ll use front projections, hard set, lighting effects, music and dust,” she says. “Abstraction is certainly part of it. Maybe we’ll see horses, a part of a horse: an eye, a hoof. Rapidly-projected images.”

As Mell, Atwell, AZO director of production Doug Provost and stage director Fenlon Lamb sort out the exterior world where Riders unfolds, another crew works on the interior landscapes of the characters driving the story.

Meanwhile, Back at the Script…

“Riders of the Purple Sage is a beloved classic,” librettist Steven Mark Kohn says. “The action in it soars. But the dialogue, in many parts, is stilted.” 

The original novel, Kohn points out, was written back in 1911, when modern storytelling was in its infancy, women’s suffrage was a radical concept, and a cruise on the Titanic was still an appealing idea. As the artist who adapted the novel into a stageable story, Kohn spent years carefully separating the timeless moments from the dated and flat. “Our primary concerns were the Mormons and Jane,” he says.

Grey’s novel, written in an era of dastardly, mustache-twirling villains, portrays the local Mormons as relentlessly evil. “They blind Lassiter’s horse and do so many awful things,” Kohn says. “Today’s audiences have been raised on television and movies, and demand more dimension from characters.” 

Without changing the plot, Kohn worked with Bohmler to show bits of the story from the Mormons’ point of view. “That’s why, in Act Three, we see the Mormons gathering in town for their sunrise service – singing ‘Come Come Ye Saints.’ Craig has put little leitmotifs like that all over the place. It makes the Mormons in the story more human, more believable, and Jane’s struggle between faith and religion more difficult.”

The bigger problem was Jane, Riders’ lead character. Actress Karin Wolverton, who will play Jane, spotted it in New York last year as she prepared for her audition. “I read the book, to get inside Jane’s head,” she says. “There are parts where Jane seems very independent, but then other parts where she’s very much the victim, looking to be rescued.” The character’s ‘damsel in distress’ tendencies also bothered Kohn and Bohmler as they led the opera through workshops.

“That’s a note that came out in the audience surveys,” Bohmler recalls. “Here’s a woman [Jane] who has been running a ranch with 60-70 men for 12 years. But she comes out at the top of the show and the Mormon elders just push her around.”

In their adaptation, Kohn amplifies Jane’s personal faith to make her a stronger presence throughout. “Grey gave us good bones,” he says. “Jane turns to her faith for strength later in the book. In the opera, Jane uses it to push back against her church when it twists power to serve its own ends.”

That difference registered with Wolverton when she sang Jane in her audition. “In the aria they gave me, I got a clearer sense of conflict between the obligations of Jane’s church leaders and her own heart telling her, ‘Think for yourself.’ That’s very relatable for a woman alone, under the kind of pressure she faces.”