Director’s Note
Two seemingly incongruous stories…two radically different musical voices…two visions of social striving that at first glance appear to have nothing to do with the other. On a constantly rotating stage, two worlds unfold simultaneously, spinning like a top that creates a visual and aural spiral, inviting associations, dissociations, collisions, and confluences. The Comet / Poppea begins as a critique of the institution of opera, but hopefully by the end it affirms everything unique to opera: the creation of an ambiguous space that enchants through juxtaposition, where the classic and the contemporary collide.
Two previous projects by The Industry led to the creation of The Comet / Poppea: I first conceived of the idea of simultaneous storytelling while staging John Cage’s Europeras 1 & 2 with the LA Philharmonic. I started imagining what other results might emerge if we used Cage’s methodologies in new ways, with less-than-intentional musical assemblage as a formal principle. I was also working with librettist Douglas Kearney on Sweet Land, which similarly split the audience into two experiences of the same opera. In the case of Sweet Land, the focus of our attention was the dislocations and expulsions of American history. We created that project to see if a new experience of opera can open up the art form to new perspectives. Both of these processes influenced the form of what we are now presenting as The Comet / Poppea.
Throughout this project, I kept finding myself thinking about one of opera’s most intractable problems: the sense of privilege and elitism attributed to the genre.Poppea seems particularly susceptible to this stereotype: unless you are an Italian in the 17th century, it’s hard to approach Poppea as anything but a learned piece, and one you have to learn to love. It implies leisure to luxuriate in it. Inherent in that elitism is the experience of exclusion – one that is compounded when we also consider race. W.E.B. Du Bois’s wrenching story “The Coming of John,” as told in Souls of Black Folk, uses an experience at the opera to illustrate how cultural institutions enforce a culture of racism and segregation. Du Bois’s fictional tale depicts a Black man who accidentally finds himself at the Metropolitan Opera and unexpectedly transported by the music of Wagner’s Lohengrin. But his communion with the music is short-lived: he is chased out of the theater from his whitedoppelgänger, the one who actually holds the ticket for that seat. John is evicted from the theater – but the music of the opera haunts him in the violent last moments of his life. It’s an ominous final image of cultural hegemony predicated on an intractable line those in power draw between the invited and the expelled.
DuBois also wrote about the concept of “striving,” a word that is at the heart at Poppea. We see characters in Monteverdi’s opera attempting to strive upwards in society – particularly Poppea herself, who tries to take charge of her destiny and find her way towards becoming Empress, no matter at what expense. DuBois encouraged a sense of striving upwards as a solution to the psychological state he called “double consciousness” – the painful division of the psyche between one’s true identity and how one is seen by others. Identifying and eradicating double consciousness was one of the fundamental struggles in achieving the uplift he hoped to see in the Black community. “The Comet,” however, offers a bleak vision for the elimination of double consciousness: perhaps it will take a disaster on the level of the country’s complete destruction to create the conditions for a society without racism? Maybe it will take a comet wiping up society as we know it for us to have a chance at escaping both our social divisions and the division within ourselves.
Thinking about double consciousness led me to imagine the constantly spinning turntable, where a Black science fiction story and Monteverdi’s classic opera could perform simultaneously, giving the audience a constantly alternating back-and-forth between two worlds. The goal is the transformation and expansion of the operatic form, which we force open to investigate its anti-elite potential – pointing out its tendencies towards exclusion while offering up a counter-proposal.
----Yuval Sharon
On L'incoronazione di Poppea
By Wendy Heller
E pur io torno qui, qual al linea al centro
qual foco a sfere e qual ruscello al mare
And I still return like a line to the center
Like fire to the sun and stream to the sea
Ottone, Act I, 1 L’incoronazione di Poppea
Like Ottone, drawn to the palace of his beloved Poppea, I, too, have been drawn to Claudio Monteverdi’s final opera “like a line to its center”—or a comet heading relentlessly toward earth. An artifact of the carnivalesque, libertine culture of mid–17th-century Venice, Poppea is an opera in which the murderous habits and perversions of the Julio-Claudians are draped in Monteverdi’s most erotic music, as if the elder composer wanted to show what might happen if words truly became the mistress of the music. And if the opera turns Roman history somewhat on its head, ending with the passionate love duet between Nerone and Poppea—who celebrate the deaths of the virtuous Seneca and Octavia—why should we care? After all, history tells us that within two years Nerone will murder Poppea (a kick while pregnant). Librettist Giovanni Francesco Busenello summed it up nicely in his argomento: “All this according to Cornelius Tacitus, but here we represent things differently.”
Here we represent things differently. Indeed. Surprisingly, the mesh of a W. E. B. Du Bois’s chilling science-fiction tale that reveals racism in 20th-century America with an exposé of corruption in Imperial Rome echoes something of the Venetian delight in weaving together multiple tales in a single opera. Here, too, the juxtaposition and layering of one opera on top of another illuminates unexpected commonalities of plot (both are cautionary tales about loss, triumph, and the crushing inevitability of history) and of music (George Lewis’s powerful score brilliantly responds to, punctuates, disrupts, and magnifies Monteverdi’s subversive expressiveness, capturing the horror, romance, and despair of Douglas Kearney’s searing libretto). The lament of the abandoned Octavia, the “disprezzata regina,” gains even more pathos when heard adjacent to Jim’s cry, “I have lost everything”; the excessive eroticism of Poppea and Nerone’s duets can be heard as unspoken desire between Jim and Julie. Merging the traumas of the ancient and modern world, The Comet / Poppea demolishes the boundary between presentism and our obsession with authenticity, providing a novel path forward for this troublesome, beloved genre.
On The Comet
By Robert Gooding-William
“The Comet” is the tenth chapter of Du Bois’s Darkwater (1920), a book that considers European imperialism, WWI, and the East St. Louis Race Riots, all in the perspective of Du Bois’s democratic ideals and his conception of beauty. When a “new comet” strikes the earth, it kills millions, in part through the release of “deadly gases.” In New York, just two people seem to be left alive: Jim, a working-class black man, and Julia, a beautiful and well to do white woman.
For most of the story Jim and Julia are alone, and during that time they imagine themselves as the sole survivors of the comet catastrophe, and as the soon-to-be progenitors of a new race and a new world. Vague allusions to the Biblical apocalypse abound in Du Bois’s science fiction, as Jim and Julia anticipate the prospect of replacing a world wherein differences of class and race structure social life with a world within which such differences cease to exist.
In Jim and Julia’s utopian vision, there is no ugliness. As in Revelations 21, where the advent of “a new heaven and a new earth” is said to entail that “there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain,” Jim and Julia’s vision of a new earth seems similarly to lack anything of the ill and hate and hurt that Du Bois elsewhere says will always be with us. For a few moments they fantasize a world in which “all is beauty.” But their fantasy is short lived, for with the ugly “Honk! Honk!” of the car that announces the arrival of Julia’s father and boyfriend, they are confronted with the resurgence of class and racial hierarchies. The story concludes on a note at once tragic and hopeful—with Jim discovering that the comet has killed his baby son, but that it has spared his wife whom he joyfully embraces.
George Lewis
I began writing the music for The Comet / Poppea under pandemic conditions in 2020 and 2021 in Berlin, where I was in residence with my family. While I was writing, I was making myself into a kind of busybody—sticking my nose into German cultural affairs, going on TV and the radio in my fractured German speech to suggest (or request) that the German and European world of contemporary classical music decolonize itself by thinking about some of the Afrodiasporic composers who, for no particularly good reason, have been absent from concert programming there. I imagined these absences as a huge hole in the roof: the rain was getting in and making a mess of the place. And I was writing this music while asking people to think about that image.
With my first opera, Afterword, there was no improvising: every word was written from start to finish. It was another kind of world—and I operate in that model quite a bit. But The Comet/Poppea is truly a different kind of experience, one with less autonomy. The music I wrote for this work would, I knew, exist as potential rather than as a complete description of the experience. For one thing, in Monteverdi, I had a co-composer. He’s not around anymore, but he still exercised considerable influence.
Du Bois’s short story “The Comet” was written in 1924, and these days, it’s considered a kind of proto-Afro-futurist text. The story is set in contemporary New York City (which, for Du Bois, was the 1920s) after a comet hits the earth, while The Coronation of Poppea unfolds in ancient Rome, where the emperor is seized with love for a woman who is not his wife. Many parallels between these two cities have been considered over the centuries, so that pairing comes with a kind of doubling. The Comet / Poppea plays with that dynamic: the two stories start to unfold in parallel worlds of time and space. As the piece goes on, those two worlds start to leak into each other. Drawing on Du Bois’s own concept of double consciousness, the opera is structured around a number of these doublings: points of repetition or intersection that underscore the dialogue between the two works and the relevance of that dialogue today.
Both “The Comet'' and The Coronation of Poppea deeply engage power and sexuality. We see this in the doubled couplings in each story: on one side of the veil, as DuBois has called it, we have his characters Julia and Jim. Jim is working-class and Black, while Julia is a white woman from the one percent. Julia isn’t really aware of the power of whiteness, but Jim certainly is. On the other side, we see Poppea, a noblewoman, and Nerone (the emperor Nero). Both of these relationships remind us that while it is possible for sexuality to transcend certain social divisions, it can also reveal and reinforce them, sometimes with bloody consequences. Seneca, the Stoic philosopher, is one of the early casualties of Nerone and Poppea’s love: he is ordered to a blameless death for daring to object to the mad emperor’s designs. During my writing process, as I was in touch with my collaborators and my students about repeated incidents of violence unfolding in the news, it struck me that Black people are often ordered to be Stoic under these conditions—to accept the brutality of a capricious power without resistance. In “The Comet,” I think we see a bit of that expectation and its consequences in Jim’s character, so that’s yet another doubling.
Then there are the comets themselves. During my research process, I found that Seneca writes about the ways that comets were seen as portents of good fortune in ancient Rome, and I think that they are regarded similarly in our own time. Du Bois plays with this fantasy in his short story, highlighting and questioning the sense of earthly hope or anticipation that gets attached (often ineffectually) to celestial events. Considering Du Bois’s work as a sociologist, I’ve come to think of “The Comet” as a kind of thought experiment, unfolding in a rather dystopian situation. Everyone on the planet has been destroyed except for these two people—or so they think. So what happens when the large-scale social forces underpinning white supremacy are absent?
I believe that it’s important to be honest about, and to honestly grapple with, the Afropessimist dimensions of Du Bois’s fictional experiment. Despite the possibility for a new order at the beginning of the story, “The Comet '' ultimately reminds us just how easily hierarchies as old as empire can return. Even when the veil is removed, it turns out that it has already affected us: it’s a type of radiation that has altered our DNA, and not for the better. So we must work even harder to remove it.
Douglas Kearney
Juxtaposition fascinates me. It powers much figurative imagining and forms ligatures of associative thinking. In the field of contrast, productive tension, and surprising chime, juxtaposition, by holding the dissimilar in a curious intimacy, helps us become aware of possibilities we maybe didn’t intuit.
Case in point: director Yuval Sharon and composer George E. Lewis’s wild idea to pair a proto-Opera of the Italian court and a work of 1920s AfroFuturism.
The Comet / Poppea is the crossroads of this pairing.
In writing the libretto for The Comet / Poppea, however, I wasn’t explicitly tasked with looking for similarities between Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione Di Poppea and W.E.B. DuBois’s “The Comet.” That was excellent. Because, as a general rule, I distrust that kind of juxtaposition—the kind you find in metaphor and simile—as it makes lyrical the idea of false equivalence, whets a hunger for hunting out versions of ourselves in what is different, rather than working to understand particularities in divergence.
Instead, what excited me about paralleling these two stories along the ill trajectory of a comet, a side-winding bad sign, cousin, perhaps of the one that Tacitus noted, 50 years after Nero’s death, portended changes in rule, was how proximity warps them, bends them, each in turn.
L’incoronazione Di Poppea follows, positively it seems, an affair between a noblewoman, Poppea and the Roman emperor, Nero. How her manipulations and his abuse of power lead to their triumphant marriage. In “The Comet,” the titular object kills a massive population in the early 20th century, sparing one Black man, Jim, and one white woman, Julia. They realize, with an almost divine sense of purpose, that they must repopulate humankind. I am interested in the pressure and pull of these stories, what they demand of each other and what 21st century opera demands of each of them. To that end, it was important that the stories survive in The Comet / Poppea; I didn’t write this libretto as a remix of either. Said plainly, I think of this opera as an adaptation, but one in which the sources are adapted to each other and not the genre of opera itself.
In our opera, DuBois’s comet tears time and space in its burning cold wake, creating a 1920s Manhattan where a radio acts as both a chorus and portal to a stylized/stymied first century Rome. In accordance with the ultimate bleakness of “The Comet,” and the historical vestments of the Monteverdi, any vision of possibility won’t appear via peering through this tattered portal. Even our opera’s deities use it without knowing its architect. This is because, here, we’ve made myth and sci-fi subject to folklore. Humbler, sure—but under its logic, characters from Heaven and Harlem got to make do. Those that force their will are the most grotesque. In The Comet / Poppea, transformation happens, just as a cold breeze, indeed, makes you colder for a time. But in such a breeze, you not only remain in your skin, you are keenly reminded of it.
The nature of change—what comes permanent, what won’t stay—haunts this libretto. As Jim, sings upon his entrance:
Where I come from, disaster is a home away from home.
I visit on vacation and I stay there when I roam.
When I swear I’m fixed to leave, I know I’m nearly there
and yesterday they would not have served me here.
See: The Comet / Poppea isn’t an exercise of pessimism, but an opportunity to play the changes in the changing same. Like folklore, like the Blues, or like a comet come round again, there’s always something to learn with another telling. Finding oneself at a crossroads simply increases the likelihood that something will come around.
L'incoronazione di Poppea
Synopsis
Love, Virtue, and Fortune are at war over the question: which of them truly runs the world? They choose ancient Rome under Emperor Nero as an experiment to see which of them influences human behavior most powerfully.
Nero is married to Ottavia but desires Poppea. Seeing her chance to become Empress, Poppea leaves her lover Ottone, who is devastated at losing her.
The court philosopher Seneca tries to persuade Nero to obey the empire’s laws: he must stay with Ottavia. Despising his sage’s advice, Nero orders Seneca to commit suicide. The philosopher obeys happily: he sees death as the only escape from a degraded human world.
Driven mad with rage, Ottavia commands Ottone to kill Poppea – but Ottone is caught and implicates Ottavia in the assassination attempt. Nero exiles both of them and now has a way to get what he wants: with Ottavia and Seneca out of the way, Nero and Poppea are free to wed. As Ottavia bids her beloved city farewell, Nero crowns Poppea as his empress.
(Whether Love, Virtue, or Fortune had any positive influence on this story will be up to the audience to decide.)
Libretto
The Comet
A recollected posh, upper floor restaurant in Manhattan on 5th Ave in the 1920s. It is swell! Accessible by elevator doors that open with a dull but cheery “DING” with each entrance. Swell! Dead diners face down in their canape of anchovies. Celery olives. Lukewarm medallions of spring lamb, swell! The dark wine sauce spreading. Red, red, red, and swell! A phone booth with a dangling receiver. A radio chatters, a window reveals a twilight skyline: all lights snuffed.
INTRODUCTION
The same introduction to Poppea is heard on the radio, distorted from its extraction through that membrane of time-space. The transmission, snagged on the comet’s crystal tail. The emptiness of the world bodies us.
The radio flickers stations, a temporal mash-up between Poppea’s world and a looping bulletin, into the shore of static.
Radio Recording
— the tail of the new comet hits us at noon this time—
— a new comet, quite a stranger—
— the tail of the new comet hits us at noon this time—
— a new comet, quite a stranger—
— the tail of the new comet hits us at noon this time—
— a new comet, quite a stranger—
— the tail of the new comet hits us at noon this time—
The elevator “DINGs” and open, revealing JIM.
SCENE 1
JIM you come up here for to dine fine, but hey, say you ready to sup amongst the dead? Hunger and horror wrassle in that Dutchman you call Body, JIM. Eat. While the food’s still warm, JIM, it’s you must turn cold. Come on, JIM. Come on.
Jim
retching and gagging at first—coming into the words, coming into the words as a kind of scatting.
They told— me to exit —wherever —they would enter,
and I— still— returned like a— line to —the center.
I woke up this morning, I was buried in a vault,
worthless when I lay and rose precious to a fault.
Today I’m king of ruin and this tomb’s my royal sphere.
And yesterday they would not have served me here.
Where I come from, disaster is a home away from home.
I visit on vacation and I stay there when I roam.
When I swear I’m fixed to leave, I know I’m nearly there
and yesterday they would not have served me here.
I swore I could leave disaster waiting on me there.
And yesterday they would not have served me here.
Heaven rained fire, came to burn with its chill.
Death lay ahead when the comet came up “tails.”
Now the avenue is crowded with the silence in my ear
and yesterday they would not have served me here.
The avenues are pouring dreadful silence in my ear.
And yesterday they would not have served me here.
Rot’s not rotten if it’s got in oaken casks.
Fate lets others drink the liquor, I just look at the flask.
Today: I fill my glass with whisky, wine, champagne and tears.
But yesterday they would not have served me here.
I’ll find the steel to eat my fill or I will disappear.
But yesterday they would not have served me here.
SCENE 2
Silent, JIM breaks out a box or sack—what’s that there? “Flares.” Stenciled on it, see? The flares among other necessaries JIM has gathered. JIM been thinking. JIM is clever. JIM calls up the elevator. It “DINGS” in time with POPPEA. Go in, JIM. Go up. Through the restaurant window, we see the light of flares. The rockets, beacons—light houses over this sea of death. A moment passes. That “DING” again, and JIM is back upon the scene. He checks his gear, the window next. He makes to prepare for who might come.
SCENE 3
The “DING” of the elevator— JULIA, a woman of perhaps twenty-five, rarely beautiful and richly gowned, with darkly golden hair, and jewels, enters and encounters JIM. They try to understand the catastrophe and how they survived.
Julia
What has happened?
Jim
Something—
Julia
—nothing stirs
What has happened?
Jim
Something—
Julia
Tell me!
Jim
—swept across the earth.
Julia
All is silence—
Jim
Many are dead.
Julia
Before my window—
Jim
Very many—
Julia
—as winnowed by the breath of God.
Jim
down in the vault,
there was sewage, rats—
Julia
Shut in my darkroom
with pictures I took—
JULIA pulls the photos from a folio. Do we see the comet coolly burning over the stage for an instant?
Jim
I have searched—
I must get to Harlem—
Julia
— I took pictures
of the comet last night—
when I came out—
Jim
Devil or comet—
Julia
—I saw the dead!
Jim
Swept across the earth
and many are dead.
Julia
My father and sister—!
Jim
I have lost—everybody.
SCENE 4
In the room, up up, over the necropolis JULIA and JIM. How long will they stand, can they stand, among the dead patrons, black tied, gowned face down, swollen. JULIA leads, and slowly they go about a task, to cover the dead with what jackets are loose—checked or hanged, limp, on chair backs. What silken pelts more coat than stole can spread, shaggy, over a grand dame’s wan shoulders. Savile Row to Madison Avenue, pretty togs turned pretty shrouds now. These rites JIM and JULIA render. Of the shroudless remainder: the empty eyes that stare, do they shut them? Their hands brush the stuck, stricken faces. Mouths caught in a final wail, do they close them? Force tight the jaws, food and all. While at these rites, JULIA and JIM speak. (All the Comet dialogue from this scene is drawn from the short story).
Julia
Have you had to work hard?
Jim
Always.
Julia
I have always been idle.
I was rich.
Jim
I was poor.
Julia
The rich and the poor are met together...
Jim
...the Lord is the Maker of them all.
And when they finish that sad work, JULIA begins to build a kind of camp. JIM falls in and moves a table. There are table cloths and empty chairs. Mind the distance, JULIA: how far apart will each sleep? While at this they also speak.
Julia
How foolish
our human distinctions seem—
now...
Jim
Yes—I was not—human, yesterday.
Julia
And your people were not
my people. But today...
Jim
The world lies beneath the waters now.
When the camp is done JULIA sits, slides out her photos of the comet. They look at them—from awe or trauma—gazing as if at the Godhead. Do we see the comet coolly burning over the stage for an instant?
SCENE 5
The comet’s hold comes loose, shaken off a-sudden. JULIA first, thrusts the photo into the folio and rises. JIM, then, to his feet as if he heard a threat. Careful. Careful. The Godhead, coolly in the folio, flat there. Swept across the earth and can sweep from the baryta paper, and keep keep keeep going.
Julia
The lights above the building,
they lit the sky so brightly.
I found my way here by their glare.
Jim
I used these flares.
Julia
They made a sign, like a star:
from the Bible or fairy tales.
Jim
Yes, I suppose.
I set them off from the roof.
Julia
Rockets into darkness.
Do you suppose—
Jim
I could set more off?
Yes, of course.
I meant to use them sparingly.
Julia
Shoot more flares. Please!
Someone else might find us.
JIM gathers more flares.
Jim
Yes! From the top floor
I can climb to the roof.
The city’s so quiet—
an ocean of silence.
Julia
Still. Someone else
might find us.
JIM calls the elevator. “DING.”
Jim
There’s hope!
Yes, I’ll go up.
JULIA goes to the window. After a moment, we see lights from the flares.
SCENE 6
1) Alone, with the dead, JULIA begins to sink. Yes, see, she’s on the way down.
Julia
When I asked for a camera,
my father must have thought
I wished to photograph our garden.
He strode to the yard
and there like a suitor,
the tripod stood mooning at flowers.
I knew what I was meant to do—
“Oh, thank you, thank you, father!”
I always knew what to do.
Look! How pretty!
Click! How fine!
Once he left, I let the sun have the film—
roses and bluets and tulips exposed.
Why photograph what I could touch?
I asked father for a camera
so I could hold light in my hands,
and later I’d stand in the dark,
to see what I had caught.
Today, the city stands in darkness.
Bright rooms reveal my empty hands.
There are no gardens in my camera.
I don’t know what I’m meant to do.
2) JULIA looks at her photo of the comet. It’s cold fire, somehow closer to her now, as if its light emanates from the flat photograph she’s holding in her hands. What sound the comet’s flight makes, she hears. It’s all she hears, her skull a bell for it. Come home, JULIA. Come home. She’s fixed there, but broken. Come home, JULIA. Come home. None of this comes fast, but builds over section 2, until at last, she lets the photo drop. JULIA rises and heads for the window.
3) JULIA at the window. What are you doing there, Julia? Silently. Climbing up it, climbing up it. What are you doing, JULIA? Climbing up it like that.
Julia
I don’t know what to do.
Look. How pretty.
Oh! How high.
I don’t know what I am meant to do—
Oh, forgive me, mercy, Father.
I do not know what to do.
JULIA pauses when the station/signal changes.
JULIA pulled, invisibly, down from the window.
JULIA standing there, blood pumping among the dead.
JULIA alive in all her horror, not knowing what, and still.
SCENE 7
The radio shifts, its static like dust settling after a bird alights. And in that aural dust what lit but the the prelude to Wagner’s Lohengrin? Now, now Julie, richly gowned and jewelled. Down in her sleeping place. And who wouldn’t? And JIM as just JIM down, too. Knells the elevator. “DING” not loud enough to wake the dead or the sleeping JULIE. But JIM is back—seeing her first, seized that maybe the comet came back to claim her, but no. The radio buzzes the Prelude how we are led, by FORTUNE. We move there. Come on, JIM.
Jim
Her eyes must be too heavy
with the weight of all these bodies
to stay open.
But she’s just sleep. No need to worry.
(laughs like there’s castor oil in it)
Now loneliness is my only worry;
though my life till now makes her stillness scary.
That’s gone with the comet
and I’m not sorry
to stop drawing my shadow
into my body,
bind that up in my skin
like something rotten.
Toss myself into a trash bin.
Even here, in big ol’ Manhattan.
Only difference between here and Alabama
is how high the piles of trash rise!
Remember that, Jim?
Rememember back when
you stepped off the train.
Nothing to your name but the letters.
Came up North for something better.
That’s gone with the comet—
here’s what’s left of all that splendor.
JIM among the ruinous dead. The celery soup scabbing and putrid. The bitter, unsweet tea as warm as flesh is cold. The canned heat an un-flame below the burnt platters. Then from the Lohengrin JIM hears something that sets free a memory. It runs, finding home in his mouth. He hums with it a brief spell before—
Jim
Remember—! Remember,
when you first heard this.
You had just left class
and wound up in a white crest
of idle New Yorkers coursing
the avenues and boulevards.
You found yourself at that old concert hall.
JIM listens to the music. FORTUNA is singing, is singing wordlessly the Lohengrin prelude. Come back, JIM. Come home.
Jim
You paid with a five dollar bill.
When you sat in the orchestra pit,
this music—it took you away—
JIM duets, briefly, with FORTUNA, on the Lohengrin. Come back, JIM. Come home.
Jim
It took you away.
But not far enough.
A change.
The white woman in the seat next to mine
wanted my shadow drawn all up inside.
The white man vexed in the seat by her side
figured his money was worth more than mine.
Usher said “Mister: If you wouldn’t mind...”
Manager gave me five dollars and sighed.
Then I was outside.
The music a fuse in my mind.
If what would explode
is gone with the comet,
will that light also go out?
SCENE 8
JULIA stirs in her sleep. Starts really. Wide-eyed and taut. She breathes some easier when she sees JIM, who sees her there breathing easier, some.
Julia
How foolish our human distinctions seem now.*
Jim
I was not—human, yesterday.*
If the music doesn’t swell, it seems to. If it does, it’s because FORTUNE appears to us but not JULIA, JIM. FORTUNE’s turning up the volume on the radio. FORTUNE’s busy fingers in the business, though FORTUNE’s fingers also got a clipboard or notebook. Do JULIA and JIM’s performances get more essentialized, performative? Is that VIRTUE up in the in-between all on the ladder?
Jim
Death, the leveler.*
Julia
And the revealer.*
From here, FORTUNE, by the radio—puppeteer/balladeer, phantom-string-fingered crooner—narrates the scene—reading from the clipboard/notebook as DuBois put it down. JULIA and JIM act it. The performance style code-switches, echoes the Poppea reality as long as it takes. Sometimes, VIRTUE doubles FORTUNE, the deities’ approximate Amen Corner. Yes, yes, yes.
Fortune
“She whispered gently,
rising to her feet with great eyes.”
Fortune and Virtue
“The mighty prophecy of her destiny overwhelmed her.
Above the dead past hovered the Angel of Annunciation.
She was no mere woman.”
Fortune
“She was neither high nor low,
white nor black,
rich nor poor.”
“She was mighty mother of all men to come—”
Virtue
“—and Bride of Life.”
Fortune
“She looked upon the man beside her and—”
Fortune and Virtue
“—forgot all else but his manhood. His strong, vigorous manhood. She saw him glorified.
Her Brother Humanity incarnate, Son of God
and great All-Father of the race to be.”
Virtue
“He did not glimpse the glory in her eyes, but stood looking outward toward the sea.”
Fortune and Virtue
“He arose within the shadows,
tall, straight, and stern.
Silently, immovably, they saw each other.
Their souls lay naked to the night.”
Virtue
“It was not lust—”
Fortune
“it was not love—”
Virtue
“It was some vaster, mightier thing
that needed neither touch of body nor thrill of soul.”
Fortune and Virtue
“She stretched her jeweled hands abroad.
He lifted up his mighty arms,
and they cried each to the other,
almost with one voice—”
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N.B. Though the timing between the Comet and Poppea worlds’ “speech”/singing can benefit the clarity of each side and moments of wry/telling juxtaposition—“...almost with one voice—” might-should probably be directly interrupted by the honking of SCENE 9 to land narratively.
SCENE 9
A car horn horns in on what was surely holy not horniness. The honking (maybe DuBois dubious homophonic slippage) gatecrash and startle JULIA and JIM; FORTUNE retreats—perhaps not precisely surprised, leaving the crackling radio’s: “A dio Roma, a dio patria, amici a dio.” JULIA runs to the window, JIM adjusts his self. His clothes, sure, if necessary. But he sets to draw his shadow in. Yes, yes. Come home, Jim.
Julia
Someone else survived!
But who—?
Jim
so quietly and to anybody, really
—careful.
Julia
My God! It’s father!
It’s Fred and my sister!
We’re here! We’re up here!
Up! Up! In the restaurant!
Please! Take the elevator!
to JIM but to anybody, really
Father’s alive!
It shall all be fine!
He’ll know what to do!
My finacé, oh steady Fred!
He made it, too.
And my sister—
I’ve even missed that pest—
her hair a golden mess!
The elevator’s “DING” hushes JULIA. Her father, J.B.H./NERO emerges from its gates. He is a man unused to losing things, and he has found, at last, his daughter in a necropolis of millions.
J.B.H./Nero
Julia! My jewel!
Where are you?
We saw the flare—
please be here...
Julia
Father! Father!
They embrace.
J.B.H./Nero
Daughter! Daughter!
Julia
Is the world—gone?*
J.B.H./Nero
Only New York.
It is terrible—awful!*
Fred and I were gone
for a hundred-mile spin*
in his new Mercedes.
We were beyond the comet’s range.
I feared I’d find you among the dead!
Julia
I feared for you. Where is Fred?
J.B.H./Nero
In his car guarding your sister—
Notices JIM for the first time. A change.
Who’s this—
Julia
—Jim!
Jim
Jim Davis.
Julia
He saved me, father!
Jim has been so clever.
It was his idea to set off flares.
J.B.H./Nero
And what’s he doing
with you up here?
Julia
Here? He found us food and shelter.
From the roof, we could see farther,
frightened to be the last survivors.
J.B.H./Nero
And what’s he been up to
with you alone up here?
Julia
He’s the messenger
turned into the deliverer.
It’s his rockets called you here
and brought us back together.
And I thank him.
Father, come—I must see Fred
and Ruby, my dear, little sister.
J.B.H./NERO’s aggression for JIM leaves him, comes away like soused dungarees. From his pocket, he pulls a thick clip of money, thumbs off an impressive sum and hands it to JIM.
J.B.H./Nero
Hm. Well, thank you—
what’s your name again?
Jim
Jim Davis.
J.B.H./Nero
I thank you, Jim.
I’ve always liked your people.
If you ever want a job, call.*
J.B.H./NERO hands JIM the money, so as not to touch him. A hard look. Come home, JIM. Then, J.B.H./NERO takes JULIA’s arm. Come home, Julia. Come home, now. They turn toward the elevator. This next passage should proceed as they recede. They call the elevator, “DINGS,” on command. They enter and go down, way down, they go.
And JIM there in silence, his shadow drawn in. His skin half wrapped about it. Affixed. There they are. JIM and his self, among the dead in the terrible awful world and then—
DING!
From the elevator comes NELLIE/OTTAVIA. And what’s that she got. Not what, now we see but who? Lay in her arms. Still, but too still. Quiet, but too quiet. A baby. Their baby. NELLIE/OTTAVIA and JIM’s. Can we call the baby—that’s too much to name the baby. Yes, we will. Call the baby ELSIE. Gone home, ELSIE. Gone home.
Nellie / Ottavia
Jim!*
Jim
Nellie! Honey!
They make to embrace, but he sees ELSIE. Still, but too still. Quiet, but too quiet.
But, what— the baby—
Nellie / Ottavia
(lullaby based on the music of Arnalta, “Oblivion soave”)
O sweet little Elsie.
Go to sleepy, baby,
keep the sweetness inside you.
Don’t weep, baby rest those crying eyes:
what’s there to see when you’re waking?
They take and they take and they take and they take all you see.Go sleepy but still you’ll find no peace.
For they’ll come while you sleep and steal all your dreams.
But maybe in death they will leave Elsie be—
so sleep.
CODA
And this, our coda, NELLIE and JIM, among the dead. There, ELSIE gone home, gone home. Through the bleeding space, wounded time, they make to make a duet with POPPEA and NERO. NELLIE and JIM, their part wounded, bleeding. What they sing is what they can mean. Something in the terrible, awful world. The rest, silence. Come home, NELLIE. Come home, JIM.
Nellie and Jim
I behold you, I find strength in you,
I press you, I tie you to me in a knot,
I no longer suffer, I no longer die,
O my life, O my treasure.
I am yours, you are mine,
my hope: say it, speak.
You are all I have,
my beloved, yes, my heart, yes, my life.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The Comet / Poppea is made possible with generous support from Lead Sponsor: Ellen Michelson.
Additional generous support for The Comet / Poppea is provided by Founding Sponsors: Carol Stein, Diamonstein-Spielvogel Foundation, Jeff Goody and June & Simon Li.
The Comet, composed by George Lewis with Libretto by Douglas Kearney is commissioned by AMOC*