Girls of the Golden West by John Adams (review)

Ryan McKinny (Clarence), J’Nai Bridges (Josefa Segovia), Julia Bullock (Dame Shirley), and the San Francisco Opera chorus in John Adams and Peter Sellars’s Girls of the Golden West. (Photo: Stefan Cohen / San Francisco Opera.)

The director Peter Sellars crafts indelible images charged with a sense of historical portent. Often, his productions reflect upon the stakes of public memory. He invites audience members to grapple with the claims of an imagined past upon their lived present. These values shape Girls of the Golden West, the latest collaboration between Sellars and composer John Adams. Adams and Sellars’ newest opera premiered at the San Francisco Opera in November 2017. It depicts the California Gold Rush through the interwoven stories of three women. The title alludes ironically to David Belasco’s play and Giacomo Puccini’s opera, The Girl of the Golden West (1910). Whereas they romanticized the American West, Adams and Sellars emphasize the violence and injustice of westward expansion. Their counter-history offers a multiethnic, multinational, and racially fractious frontier. The characters struggle for a chance at the wealth of the conquered land and the privileges of US citizenship in the freshly minted state of California.

A scene from the first act of Girls of the Golden West. (Photo: Cory Weaver / San Francisco Opera.)

In addition to directing, Sellars spliced together the libretto from a range of archival materials, including memoirs, poetry, and miners’ ballads. The first act introduces the characters within the exploitative context of settler capitalism. It begins with the white prospector Clarence (played by Ryan McKinny) trumpeting the arriving miners with text from Mark Twain’s hardscrabble yarn, Roughing It: “It was a driving, vigorous, restless population . . . the most gallant host that ever trooped down the startled solitudes of an unpeopled land.” However, the libretto soon upends this mythologizing lore by centering on stories of women and people of color.

Act 1 constellates around three couples in the mining town of Rich Bar. At the core are Dame Shirley (Julia Bullock), a doctor’s wife, and Ned Peters (Davóne Tines), a black cowboy who escaped from plantation slavery. They forge a close friendship with growing hints of attraction. Dame Shirley was the pen name of Louise Clappe; her Shirley Letters to her sister constitute a major archive of life in gold country and provide much of the libretto. Dignified, perceptive, and humane, Shirley and Ned lament the contrast between the splendor of the California countryside and the mercenary society despoiling it.

Two additional couples fill out the first act, their stories entangled in discriminatory practices of gender, nationality, and race. The Chinese immigrant Ah Sing (Hye Jung Lee), enslaved by sex trafficking, works as a prostitute at the raucous gambling house, the Empire Hotel. She deems the white miner Joe Cannon (Paul Appleby) a potential path to freedom, so strives for romance. The Mexican couple Josefa (J’Nai Bridges) and Ramón (Elliot Madore) work at the Empire as, respectively, a waitress and a card dealer; they keep their relationship secret, because “without a girl there can be no hotel, without a beautiful one there can be no business.” After Joe panics at Ah Sing’s displays of affection, Josefa must repel his ugly, drunken advances.

The tensions that percolate through the first act coalesce into terrifying acts of nationalist violence in act 2. The major contours are rooted in a historical event that occurred on July 4th and 5th, 1851, in Downieville, California. Fueled by alcohol and jingoism, US miners, predominately white, attacked the town’s Mexican, Chilean, and Chinese residents in an effort to drive them away and steal their claims. In the opera, Ned names this threat and condemns America’s whitewashed promise of freedom with text from Frederick Douglass’s searing speech, “What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?” Cannon forces his way...