(Photo credit: Cory Weaver)

The West Coast premiere of “The Handmaid’s Tale“, by composer Poul Ruders and librettist Paul Bentley fills the War Memorial Opera House with a performance as harrowing as the dystopic story itself. Delayed by the pandemic from its originally scheduled debut, the co-production of San Francisco Opera (SFO) and the Royal Danish Theatre runs through October 1.

Complex Sonic Landscape

Emotions worn down by brutal repression are underscored by the exhausting and complex sonic landscape created by Ruder for the opera of “The Handmaid’s Tale”, based on the bestselling and grimly prescient novel by Margaret Atwood. Indeed much of the resonance of this production stems from its reinforcement of topics currently raging in the early 21st century. Reproductive repression, sexual exploitation and gender disapproval are but a few that were feminist headlines in the era of Atwood’s 1985 novel. Most shocking is how little has changed in the past 40 years.

Under the vigorous and driving baton of Maestro Karen Kamensek, the SFO orchestra gave a fierce account of Ruder’s abrasive score. Set in a post-American theocracy called Gilead in 2030, the tale is told through the eyes of protagonist handmaid Offred, newly torn from her family and taken into reproductive slavery. “I wish my story were different,” Offred confesses in the sere, poetic words of librettist Bentley. Dominating most of the performance’s two and a half hours, American mezzo-soprano Irene Roberts sings Offred with relentless and persuasive emotion. A supple and highly physical singer/actor Roberts brings a rich tone to her vigorous vocal work, easily climbing from contralto to the high-middle of her tessitura to sing in spoken word terrain. It is an appealing range for the opera’s narrator.

In several scenes Roberts is matched beautifully by mezzo-soprano and former Adler Fellow Simone McIntosh, who performs Offred’s pre-revolution self. In one of the work’s most successful unfoldings of vocal magic, the two women—the before and after Offreds—share a powerful duet, exchanging past and future dreams. The opera’s most compelling musical theme was the interchange between Offred’s solo elegies and the ritual chants of group submission impeccably created by members of the San Francisco Chorus who perform roles of various Handmaids, wives, prison matrons (called Aunts), guards, and security police.

From the explosive opening, in which we learn how the imprisoned handmaids must live with their fate, to the ambiguous final scene, “The Handmaid’s Tale” makes splendid use of the full colors of the innovatively-augmented orchestra. In his atonal post-modern score, Ruder expands the range of instrumentation to include organ, digital keyboards, and five percussionists on instruments such as glockenspiel, vibraphone, Bali gong, tubular bells, anvil, chains, bass drum, and a dozen more. The score breathes and contracts with dizzying speed through a repertoire of musical ideas that lean toward gamelan and string-intensive non-Western sound sculpture. There is not a melodic line in sight.

The music sharpens its dissonance as the stage transforms into the harrowing confines of Gilead. “The Handmaid’s Tale” offers compelling visuals in a series of narrative vignettes, whose moods alter dramatically as the libretto moves through the imprisoned fertility slaves’ pasts and forward into their dreams of escape.

Production Highlights

The opera’s set design, swift rearrangement of stage props, and the raising and lowering of a huge metallic “prison” wall, all illuminate the story in flashback memories of “the time before” interlaced with the current ruthless regime. Much of the success of this work depends upon the artistry of the creative team working with director John Fulljames, former director of the Royal Danish Opera and Associate Director of London’s Royal Opera. Notably set designer Chloe Lamford, who San Francisco audiences will recall designed for Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence”, associate set designer Helen Hebert, lighting designer Fabiana Piccioli, costume designer Christina Cunningham, and Will Duke, whose projected icons and hypnotic images form conceptual counterpoint to the sung words and performed rituals. Thou shalt not read, thou shalt not write in the Republic of Gilead.

Most effective is the staging that allows the pre-Gilead past — filled with hope, children, and love — to exist simultaneously with the joyless enforcement of women as fertility slaves. The effect manages to be both beautiful and chilling.

The opera itself is visually more interesting than either its words or music. Given the gripping subject matter, it was curious that so little dramatic tension made its way into the production.

Yes, it’s true that Afghanistan, poverty, and sex trafficking haunted the series of interlocking vignettes. We come very close, certainly in Atwood’s telling, to the ugly underbelly of all utopias, in which the rule of a few dictates the actions of a manipulated few. Yet much of the second act felt interminable. Musically the tale became repetitive. And not enough tension had been built into the narrative. Perhaps a post-modern trope, yet one that dulled the appetite.

Stellar Cast

In her role of Offred, Irene Roberts provided an impressive mastery of dissonant soliloquies, an astonishing feat given the equal, yet utterly unmatching dissonance of the orchestral interplay. Ruder’s score is unrelenting in its peeling away of canonical harmonies. In Gilead all music is angular, brittle, and searingly unresolved. We are meant to be uncomfortable, both by what we see and what we hear. The opera, undeniably difficult to watch at many points, succeeds in capturing the grim futility of a world without either freedom or hope.

A splendid Lindsay Ammann made her company debut as Serena Joy, a former Gospel singer who has become the barren wife of Offred’s Commander. Ammann looked fantastic, clad in deep blue contrast to the handmaids’ long red robes and white winged caps. She also gave complete dimension to her character’s seductive ambiguity, a fine actor with a sensuous soprano voice. As the Commander bass John Relyea returned to SFO after a 14-year absence. His role, written for a perilously low tessitura, was allowed little relief, although he managed to coax occasional warmth into a character as cold as patriarchy itself. So low in the bass range was much of his singing that it occasionally disappeared against the sheer power of the orchestration.

On the other hand, with stupefying ease former Adler Fellow Sarah Cambidge unleashed her stratospheric very high tessitura as the handmaids’ supervisor Aunt Lydia, tossing off an unrelenting sequence of crystal clear As and Bs (probably Cs as well), articulating each word with diamond clarity. “You are only containers,” she intones at the highest reaches of the soprano range to her new acolytes. “Walking wombs.” Her character indoctrinates Offred at the beginning of the opera, Cambridge singing the harsh reality of the new incarceration with utter confidence and superb acting skills. Both performer and role were irresistible.

Known for her commitment to new composers Grammy Award-winning American maestro Karen Kamensek conducted Ruders’ harrowing score with urgency. Her skill with such a huge company of instruments, as well as huge cast onstage helped maintain a sense of focus to the electrifying sound. Especially during onstage scenes of harsh violence, Kamensek fearlessly commanded her diversity of strings into tsunamis of shimmering glissando. However abrasive the score’s atonal twists and turns, the maestro was able to infuse a cold, dark beauty of tone into every harsh hue.

The entire cast believed in this painful and heroic endeavor. Tenor Christopher Oglesby was fine in the likeable character of Luke, Offred’s husband from the “before” times.  Current Adler Fellow Caroline Corrales was a saucy soprano and robustly engaging actor as Offred’s friend Moira.

Katrina Galka produced passionate coloratura cries of protest and denial as handmaid Janine/OfWarren. Her acting pyrotechnics pumped much-needed emotional charge into the center of the piece.

Sara Couden, long a charismatic presence on the local oratorio and opera scene brings her seemingly bottomless alto resonance to her SFO debut as the chambermaid Rita.

Matthew DiBattista turned a small cameo as the sexually compliant prison Doctor into a memorable bit of stagecraft.

Congratulations to concert master John Keene‘s preparation of the peerless San Francisco Opera Chorus. The audience was clearly unsettled, as well as appreciative of the September 20 performance of “The Handmaid’s Tale”. The content is not only bleak, but some scenes of explicit sexual acts and inmate executions produced shockwaves. Shocking, yet given the barren country of Gilead being portrayed, not gratuitous. Viewer discretion is advised.

Sung in English with English supertitles, the performances of “The Handmaid’s Tale” run through October 1 (7:30 p.m.), 2024. Approximate running time: 2 hours, 50 minutes including one intermission.