Michael Newton stars in Zeke Virant’s experimental opera Tydrus the Twit.
Photo by Paul Cox for BushwickBK
By day, Pretty Boy is a slow-witted punk with no future in Middle Georgia. But when he’s passed out on whiskey by night, he becomes his own tragic hero, the center of Zeke Virant’s experimental opera Tydrus the Twit. Playing this week at Bushwick Project for the Arts, Tydrus is an avant-garde attempt at the old fairy-tale-mirroring-real-world story, like The Neverending Story with bodystockings and a monochrome set. Oh, and the music is a bit different, too.
"Flutter lips, whistle, lightly shriek, bumble, buzz, grunt, moan, hum, make clicks with your tongue, grumble, yawn, and spit. Choose a few of those."
The score is a jumble of procedural notation, suggestions for improvisation, and games for the ensemble ("Melodica: Focus on the problems you have with your musical partner’s improvisation"). Instruments traditional and not share time with juicy mouth sounds. The looseness of the score denies opera’s demands for expert musical interpretation and, Zeke says, "reveals a truer sense of how the world is populated: a few virtuosos for every thousand amateurs."
Modest words for the orchestra, but both the musicians and the actors who make up the Brain Rain Players make something more than amateurish out of it all. Michael Newton, starring as Pretty Boy and Tydrus, plays the range from adolescent to demonic with a confused energy that rings true of every fantasy hero who’s ever been duped by a witch. Maxwell Cramer, Carl Kranz, and Ted Quinlan are his scarecrow, tin man, and lion, animating three characters that are almost as strong as the lead despite their anonymizing bodystockings. Zoe Morris plays all of the female characters – mother, witch, true love – but it’s probably not for this alone that they all seem to be the same woman.
Though there is a dragon and a queen to fall in love with, the performance does something new and wonderful by representing its dream world in the stark unreality of experimental theatre rather than the traditional sparkling Narnia. The mirror world of Pretty Boy’s dream seems desaturated by an over-stimulated waking life, but holds its own magic, like the black and white pixel art Zeke draws in his spare time.
Tydrus is uncomfortable fantasy for a generation that doesn’t fall for fairy tales; we know its love story won’t end well because the title character is both hero and villain. The fates of Pretty Boy and Tydrus alike are sealed by two of the black-clad companions, who give away the central myth early on:
"Oh my dear brother, life can put you in such odd ways. It will take the ten things you love most about the world and create such a noise that all you love will become but the ten things you hate the most."
"And everything that you are will become thunder and then forever lost."
Tydrus the Twit will be performed tonight at 9pm and on the 10th and 11th at 8pm, at Bushwick Project for the Arts, 304 Meserole Street.
