Taking Up Serpents
Music by Kamal Sankaram
Libretto by Jerre Dye
Washington National Opera
American Opera Initiative Festival
Terrace Theater
Kennedy Center

I didn’t find Taking Up Serpents, this year’s hour-long opera, quite as captivating as last year’s Proving Up, but I still really enjoyed it, and found it quite thought provoking. Taking Up Serpents, as the name hints, is about a Pentecostal family in a snake handling church. As we see in a flashback, the father, something of a nogoodnik, has an epiphany and becomes a snake-handling preacher. His daughter is less than enamored with the snakes, and she is eventually disparaged, or even rejected, by her father, for being a sinful daughter of Eve.

In the talkback after the performance, the librettist described growing up a boring Methodist, but then having a conversion to an evangelical denomination, so he was writing somewhat from experience. (It wasn’t clear whether he was still a believer.) The composer was not religious, but grew up in a small town with one movie theater, one bar, and six churches (an hour east of San Diego, she said), so she was also familiar with the characters in the opera. So on the whole, it was a very sympathetic view of these people and their faith. Although … at the end, Kayla, the protagonist, has a collapse of faith: she proclaims that God is dead, and that she is the light. Apparently her teenaged avatar showed up with a snake cage (I saw that much), and light emanated from the cage and she put her hand in it (I missed that). So there was supposedly some ambiguity about whether Kayla goes back to her church. I think I prefer to think that she has completely broken with her past, and is no longer burdened by her father’s regret that she wasn’t a boy.

The opening aria was very languid (although I thought the staging was a little vague), and it set up a number of musical motives which came back throughout the rest of the opera. The writing was generally lyrical (helped by the recurring motives), and the consonance of the music got a boost from the occasional shape note singing of the chorus. The bus scene, where Kayla travels back home, was particularly effective in this regard, with Kayla pondering her circumstances, and the bus driver and passengers singing a shape note chorus.

I noticed that the open captioning left out the “fucks”. Someone asked about that in the talkback, and Robert Ainsley, the AOI program director, said that was standard WNO practice.

One really interesting bit of orchestration was the use of a whirly tube to make an eerie sound during the flashback scenes. Kamala Sankaram, the composer, pointed out that you can get these tubes for $12 online.

Alison Moritz, the director, said that she worked with AJ Guban as her lighting director on both this opera and last year’s Proving Up, and that his lighting was key to isolating the different threads of action happening simultaneously on different parts of the stage. (This was in response to an audience question on dealing with these multiple layers in the libretto.) I thought it was very effective. Like Proving Up, this production had a very sparse stage: in this case, a chain link fence across the stage, with the snake handling scenes taking place behind the fence, and the rest of the action in front. Large crates served as bus seats. The only real set prop was the hospital be in which the father lies dying.

Cast:
Kayla	Alexandria Shiner
Nelda	Eliza Bonet
Daddy	Timothy J. Bruno
Reba/Young Mother/Holiness Congregation Member	Hanna Hagerty
Save Mart Customer/Queer Kid/Holiness Congregation Member	Marlen Nahhas
Save Mart Customer/Bus Driver/Preacher	Arnold Livingston Geis
Young Kayla (non-singing)	Arya Anoush Balian
Crew:
Conductor	Lidiya Yankovskaya
Director	Alison Moritz
Costume Designer	Lynly Saunders
Lighting Designer	A.J. Guban
Cover Conductor	Stephanie Rhodes Russell
Assistant Conductor	Michael Baitzer
Stage Manager	Sean Corcoran