Deconstruction and Development of the Opera Carmen

Deconstruction and Development of the Opera Carmen! DAN FRIEDMAN AND GABRIELLE KURLANDER The Castillo Theatre's theatrical engagement with Georges Bizet's opera Carmen involves five productions of three different Carmen-based scripts over the ten years between 1987 and 1997. All of these productions were adaptations of. or, perhaps more accurately, responses to and dialogues with, Bizet's Carmen. Taken together, they constitute a deconstruction/reconstruction not only of Carmen but of theatrical conventions and ideological assumptions about nineteenth-century opera. The Castillo Theatre is a fifteen-year-old off-off-Broadway theatre in New York City noted for its experimental productions, its populist political concerns , and its postmodem philosophical bent. Both authors of this paper have been involved with the Castillo Theatre during the period of this engagement - Gabrielle Kurlander as a perfonner, director, and producing director of the theatre, Dan Friedman as a dramaturg. Castillo was founded in 1983 by seven politically engaged artists. Most of them had been involved in community-based, government-funded cultural projects that had been or were in the process of being de-funded by the Reagan administration. The founders of Castillo had met as activists in the independent political movement in New York City, and they had in common a commitment to culture as a means of community empowerment. Given their political/cultural orientation, and the conservative zeitgeist of the time, the founders of Castillo were detennined to find a means of funding the theatre that was not dependent on either government or corporate money. As an alternative , they decided to go directly to the people - not to theatre people, per se, but to ordinary New Yorkers from all social strata and ethnicities. If this diverse community supported an independent cultural center and theatre with no strings attached, then it would survive; if the public was indifferent, the theatre would die. To develop this financial independence and audience base, the artists/activModern Drama, 43:2 (Summer 2000) 276 Deconstructing Carmen at Castillo 277 ists at Castillo canvassed door to door in neighborhoods throughout New York City and the surrounding suburbs and set up tables on street comers, talking to strangers about the Castillo Theatre and its sister cultural projects, such as the All Stars Talent Show Network, and asking for their financial support. Today this outreach is done primarily through a sophisticated volunteer telemarketing operation. Since 1989 over 400,000 people have given $10 or more to maintain Castillo's independence. The seven founders have grown to an active volunteer pool of ISO people - who do everything from performance to public relations, from fund-raising to cleaning the bathrooms. Castillo has a beautiful seventy-one-seat theatre in Manhattan's SoHo arts district and nearly 2,000 subscribers (many of whom are not traditional theatregoers). It produces five to eight plays each year, most of them new. Castillo's audience, built through the same grassroots outreach effort that funds it, is more diverse, ethnically and economically, than a typical off-off New York theatre audience. Most significantly , in our view, Castillo has achieved all this while remaining independent of government, corporate, or foundation funding.2 We have gone into such detail about the Castillo Theatre's history and unique funding operation because these factors go far toward explaining both the why and the how of Castillo's engagement of Carmen. Castillo's ongoing interest in the theatricality of Carmen grows out of an appreciation, on the onc hand, of the beauty of the original opera (particularly of the music), and, on the other. a concern that its modality as a theatre fann has grown so distant as to make it (and virtually all classic opera) inaccessible to most American theatregoers and, in particular, to Castillo's audience, which tends to be more working-class and less theatrically sophisticated than other New York audiences . After all, although opera has been expropriated by a cultural elite in the United States, it started out as a popular theatrical form with a large workingclass following, particularly in Italy. Castillo considered opera too beautiful to reject; the challenge it faced, when it decided to produce its first play based on Carmen - Carmen's Community - in 1987...