Up a Creek

“You sure this is the right address?” the uber driver asked me as we arrived at Plank Road in Maspeth on Saturday, Sept. 9.

We’d been winding, for some time, past industrial parks, flatbed trucks, and derelict buildings until the screen flashed “You have arrived.” “Yep, pretty random right?” I said, noticing other befuddled riders being dropped off.

Approaching the shore, I was handed a flashlight and program by an usher in a hi-vis vest. “Newtown Odyssey: A Floating Opera,” it said. Inside, a hand-drawn map: “Follow the flow of music as the performance moves south, from area 1 to 2.”

“Newtown Odyssey” is a collaboration between librettist Dana Spiotta, composer Kurt Rohde, and designer Marie Lorenz.

In “area 1,” where a crowd had gathered on the shore, a floating barge held two “researchers,” a flutist, and a DJ. Over them, a canopy of plastic bottles and other detritus.  

Canoeing concertgoers (there were “by land” or “by water” options) drifted lazily, occasionally bumping into each other.

Though it had drizzled earlier in the day — the Sunday, Sept. 10 performance got rained out — the concert was well attended. Still, gray clouds hung in the air as mosquitos nibbled at my ankles.

At first, there was just ambient sound and field recordings. But, as the sun began to set, two tour guides in orange lifejackets appeared. “Hi! Don’t touch the water” they sang. “Welcome to the derelict, flotsomatic, hydrophilic Newton Creek.”

They were accompanied by agitated strings (located somewhere “offstage”), flute, synths, and percussion. It sounded, at times, Philip Glass-esque, before turning more dissonant.

“Let me introduce myself: I’m Citizen Scientist,” sang Sharon Harms from the barge. “And my assistant: Citizen Scientist 2. She doesn’t speak.”

Spiotta’s might be the only libretto to contain the words “black mayonnaise.” Harms also played an electronic instrument resembling a hair iron, which I later learned was a “g.rainstick.”

We were then led down a lit path with a sound installation — ghostly voices singing “awoo awoo” — and shown a video: Proposal for Site 1-1A. “Hit ‘em with the pitch deck,” sing the Real Estate Brokers.

The libretto is full of buzz words: “Green space,” “public art walk,” “recycled papers,” “market rate,” “gastropub.” I was struck by soprano Charlotte Mundy’s crystalline voice singing “glass bottom.”

But mezzo Kyra Sims stole the show as the ghost of (fictional or non-fictional?) 1890s industrialist Conrad Vanwalt. “I dream of a sanitary city,” she sings, gorgeously, into a loudspeaker.

With stylized movements — wide-eyed and puppet-like — in steampunk garb, she urges, “Get in your uber quickly, to your comfortable, clean homes.”

Even more dramatic was Mundy as the Creek Being: “Give me the retched refuse of your teaming shore,” she wails, Caliban-like, wearing dayglow yellow wings.

The “glistening oil makes a perfect mirror for your faces peering down,” she sings, leaning ominously into the water.

The effect of the opera, overall, was haunting and evocative. But — other than raising awareness about Newtown’s pollution — I was unsure of the larger message.

Is the answer to climate change … opera?

Photos by Walter Wlodarczyk