Prototype, the New York Festival of Avant-Garde Opera, Turns 12
Prototype, the festival of new opera-theater and music-theater from Beth Morrison Projects and Here, presented a dizzyingly diverse spectrum of performances in 2025. Overall, the festival came off like last year’s Mets’ playoff season, with wildly divergent highs and lows. It encompassed some of the most exciting theater this city has seen in the past twelve months, alongside shows representing some of the more moribund tendencies in the contemporary avant-garde. While no single quality stood out, a handful of themes emerged. Firstly, imitation: shows like Black Lodge that seemed divorced from the past but eager to harvest from it, in the spirit of A.I. Compared to The Black Rider, Tom Waits’ 1990 rock opera on the same subject, Black Lodge fell flat. Meanwhile, genuinely engaging, even brilliant works like Christopher Cerrone’s In a Grove and Sol Ruiz’s Positive Vibration Nation allow us, as the festival’s tagline entreats, to “see something new.”
This year’s festival kicked off with John Glover’s Eat the Document, a new opera based on Dana Spiotta’s 2006 novel about New Left activists from the 1970s and what’s framed as their “successors” in the 1990s: riot grrrls, hacktivists and subvertisers. The main stage at Here was designed in two parts: on one half vintage records, a Midwestern basement with 1970s-style Colonial Revival furniture; on the other, swank industrial bookcases like a sales display at Urban Outfitters.
The production paid close attention to precise period detail, down to the layered T-shirts and mesh long-sleeved blouses of the ‘90s characters. But Eat the Document musically took very little from the song stylings of either the ’60s or ‘90s. Aside from some brief folk harmonies and a jarringly out-of-context riot-girl rock aria, the show stuck close to contemporary musical theater. Some performers—particularly Danielle Buonaiuto as the young Mary—sang with gorgeous color and passion. There were several standout performances, such as Buonaiuoto and Amy Justman’s duet, Tim Russell’s bright and impassioned performance as the son of the erstwhile terrorist and Adrienne Danrich’s fulsome voice and versatile character embodiments. These performances uplifted a production that was unfortunately dominated by a libretto full of leaden, journalistic prose. While there was enough fire, talent and youthful energy to make for a splendid show, the clunky language and mediocre score zapped the passion out of the subject matter.
Throughout, a tenuous connection is drawn between Weathermen-style 1970s militants and 90s activists. The program describes the opera, “Shifting between the protests in the 1970s and the consequences of those choices in the 1990s.” The tragic existence of ‘70s-era vanguardist militant groups like the Weathermen, who conducted bombings and ended up on the FBI terror list, seems like a ripe subject for opera. Unfortunately, the show creators approach radicalism as well-meaning tourists who aren’t interested in hearing ideas that might transform their worldviews. Truly, a missed opportunity.
Meanwhile, over in Brooklyn’s Bric Arts, was Black Lodge, “a live multimedia event” with singer Timur, his band, the Dime Museum and the Isaura String Quartet. The show’s main feature is a film inspired by the life and “complicated mythologies” of beat writer William S. Burroughs. Described on the festival website as “a Lynchian psychological escape room,” the film creates a dream space, referred to as a Bardo, for a Burroughs-styled character (Timur) to relive some of the seminal, violent events of his early life. The show was a live performance of the music from the film that was performed during the screening.
The film was more reminiscent of Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle than anything in the worlds of Burroughs or David Lynch. While beautifully produced and with high production values, it turns away from creating the fug of nightmare and subterranean weirdness of either of its purported influences. It is surgically austere and challenging to watch, with the true-blooded avant-gardist’s disdain for capturing our emotions or giving sensory pleasure.
The opening night of Black Lodge began with an immersive theater presentation, Bardo, consisting of performance artists in multi-genre tableaux. The program describes Bardo as “a liminal space between life and death where lost souls linger, awaiting passage to the next realm.” Aspects of the immersive performance were connected with Black Lodge, and participants were asked to travel through a Bardo of their own before witnessing the Burroughs character’s trials and sufferings.
We wandered rooms where three zombie writers in Hell endured an eternity of writerly punishment (being literally forced to eat their words); a string ensemble played at a ghoulish ritual where wraiths writhed and zombie nurses blew bubbles; and a Beetlejuice-like demon and his BDSM slaves retrieved written dreams or regrets from participants and then read them aloud in a reverberating Disney villain voice. It was as if some Tim Burton-inspired art students decided to put on a haunted house in MoMA. The tableaux were good, but the experience was not immersive and required a different context. To be fair, the show had lost its original space at the Village East (a more atmospheric former Yiddish Theatre turned movie theater) and had to move to the more antiseptic Bric.
David T. Little’s music for Black Lodge, performed by Timur and the Dime Museum, was by far the highlight of the evening. Timur’s versatile split tenor, eerily oozing up and down octaves to the harsh accompaniment of his metal band, was memorable. Its ability to be so classically complex, with many textures and surprises, sounded like a confluence of Klaus Nomi, John Cage and Godspeed You! Black Emperor.
I returned to Here a few days after exiting the Bardo for Sol Ruiz’s Positive Vibration Nation. This “musical theater rock guaguanco opera” follows six characters from Miami in the year 3050 who journey in search of their roots. On their adventures, they discover the keys to unlock their “musical superhero power,” which allows them to take to the stars and explore the galaxy.
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Guaguancó is a kind of rumba, originating in Cuba, where the singer sings a narrative as dancers perform a couples’ dance symbolizing sexual competition. Ruiz combines the guaguancó sound with a panoply of Latin styles: cumbia, modern Spanish rap, reggae and undoubtedly other influences I couldn’t catch. The 1-hour LatinX space opera is fast, exciting and extremely funny. The space-age folk costumes, Afrofuturist design elements and glam intergalactic lighting all cohered with the spectacular music into a packed and joyful hour of thumpingly good opera. The audience whistled, cheered, tapped their feet and was even entreated to stand and dance. The multitalented performers dance, sing, play instruments and embody their space cowboy characters with delightful panache.
Like Gelsey Bell’s mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning], Positive Vibration Nation points in an exciting new direction for avant-garde opera. It points outward instead of inward and tells a new story in a genuinely new way that purposefully draws us in. In an age when so much cultural production has been ground down to mere mimicry, seeing something genuinely new is spiritually soothing. The zany comic book antics, immaculate vibes and ringingly good intergalactic song stylings present a truly original work. The show is also daringly vulnerable and willing to walk the edge of cringe to give us something joyful and generous. Positive Vibration Nation also shows just how brilliant a performance can be by virtue of strong artistry and a dynamic ensemble.
A few days later, across town in the East Village’s La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, I saw In a Grove, Christopher Cerrone and Mary Whitaker’s opera inspired by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s 1922 short story of the same name. The original story deals with the violent stabbing of Takehiro, a samurai, with the events leading up to and following his death shown from multiple perspectives in a series of testimonies. The opera Europeanizes the characters and changes their context and professions but hews close to the emotional dynamics of the original story.
Cerrone’s score is full of slow, pulsing phrases, rhythmic tugs in and out of recitative and spare and dramatic instrumentation. The minimalist use of vocal manipulation, subtly complex reverb, looping and the like creates a sound that mimics the atmospheric smoke effects on stage. Director Mary Whitaker places the performers on an empty runway, like the footbridge on a Kabuki stage, with the audience in straight lines on either side. The stage is empty, aside from a glass screen in the center that moves on and off stage at important transitions. The staging feels purposefully two-dimensional, like a long painting on a screen, and amplifies the drama of the excellently staged violence.
The costumes are 19th Century and military in design and made of light cloth like parachute silk. These simple, beautiful designs play an outsized role in this minimalist staging, standing in for much that is not shown. Singers Mikaela Bennett, John Brancy, Chuanyuan Liu, and Paul Appleby carried the show with trembling passion and immaculate skill. Like oppositional winds lapping a still lake, they rocked us from one end of this extended murder ballad to the other. You could not have asked for better performers.
The heady, throbbing, percussive score, shocking and tragic story and ingenious staging left me feeling (in the best way possible) like I, too, had just discovered a murdered man on a walk through a burning forest. In a Grove is a triumph and among the finest works at this year’s festival.
Throughout the ups and downs of this year’s Prototype Festival, reality came in and mirrored what was staged. Los Angeles burned, and David Lynch entered the Bardo while we took in the festival’s new works. Whatever else one can say about Prototype, it certainly reflects our current moment. Whether its end times vibes represent an end or the end of one world and the beginning of another has yet to be seen. Prototype takes a balanced approach to operatic apocalypse—the glass is half empty and half full. I’ll be returning to see what new music emerges from this chaotic Bardo next year.