Risking Boos, the Met Opera Puts Present-Day America Onstage

Simon Stone paused during a recent rehearsal at the Metropolitan Opera, looked up at the stage, and surveyed his new production of Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor.” Nadine Sierra, singing the title role in a secondhand wedding gown, was preparing to descend the rusting fire escape of an old house for her famous, climactic mad scene.

“She’s covered in blood at this point, so it won’t be as pretty,” Stone said, explaining how Sierra will look when the staging opens on April 23. “Or maybe it will be even prettier.”

Pretty or not, this mad scene will be different than any “Lucia” — any production, period — in the Met’s history. Many directors have updated classic operas, like the company’s most recent “Rigoletto” stagings, set in 1960s Las Vegas and Weimar-era Berlin.

But by transporting Donizetti’s bel canto tragedy to present-day America for his Met debut, Stone is breaking new ground. And risking boos: Luc Bondy’s 2009 “Tosca” is a reminder that playing around with the classics can infuriate a house that doesn’t welcome departures from tradition.

“There is always a chance of upsetting people who don’t want to see something different,” said Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager. “I do think that over the years during my tenure, even the older elements of the audience have become more adventurous. That doesn’t mean everyone’s going to love it, but hopefully everyone is going to be stimulated.”

As Sierra slowly made her way down the fire escape, she was surrounded by fragments of a faded postindustrial town: a drab motel, a pawnshop, a liquor store with an A.T.M. to pick up cash for drug deals. Where the opera’s libretto depicts a decaying and desperate aristocracy in 18th-century Scotland, Stone has found contemporary resonances and turned the Met stage into something of a graveyard of the American dream — a landscape of opioid abuse, economic hardship and the last, dangerous gasp of white male power.

Both Stone and Sierra are veterans of European houses, where a production like this wouldn’t be out of the ordinary; at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, for example, Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” has a similar look in David Bösch’s 2016 staging, with a group of older men exerting outsize control over their economically depressed community. And Peter Sellars directed distinctly American contemporary takes on Mozart in the 1980s. But the new “Lucia” is uncharted territory for the Met, and a test for traditionalists.

“I hope people give it a chance and not be prejudiced before they are able to sense it a bit,” Sierra said in an interview. “Art is ever-evolving, and if we’re always stuck in the same thing, we’re only speaking about history; we’re not creating history.”

BORN IN AUSTRALIA and now based in Vienna, Stone, 37, is best known to New Yorkers as a theater director who adapts classic texts about desperate women to mirror modern times. His “Medea,” which ran at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in early 2020, was a stripped-down portrait of a marriage in free fall. And when his unsparing and fluid treatment of Lorca’s “Yerma” — an argument for how the internet can make urban life feel as petty and small as the original play’s rustic village — traveled to the Park Avenue Armory in 2018, it attracted raves.

It also caught Gelb’s eye. “I was enormously impressed by the magic of the production,” he recalled. “It was a tour de force of directing and storytelling.”

Gelb approached Stone, who was then just emerging as an opera director, and they arrived at “Lucia,” which will not be the last of his productions at the Met. His staging of Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence,” which premiered last summer at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France, is coming to New York in a future season. And Gelb said that they have also discussed a potential show created from scratch, in which Stone would serve as librettist and director.

Stone’s opera résumé has leaned on 20th-century and contemporary works, such as Aribert Reimann’s “Lear,” Korngold’s “Die Tote Stadt” and, most recently, Berg’s “Wozzeck.” But having directed “La Traviata” in Paris in 2019 — transforming Violetta into a digital influencer — he said he was attracted to the classic Italian repertory because “there’s something so dramaturgically strong” about it.

“I find with 20th-century opera, your job is to make it as accessible and clear as possible,” he said. “But with Italian operas, the music is so timeless and recognizable. It’s like Shakespeare: You’re not going to surprise people with what happens at the end of ‘Hamlet.’ What you can do then is really explore the contemporary relevance of these classics. So it’s a different job; you can flex your muscles as a director more.”

Some might say that relevant art needs no updating because it registers regardless of context, the way a poem or novel can speak clearly across centuries. But Stone prefers to make those connections literal — in the service, he believes, of the audience.

“Opera is the most beautiful and total of art forms, and it sparks every fiber of your being as well as provokes all of your thoughts and fantasies,” he said. “And I don’t think that can really happen if you consider a distance from it and think, ‘That’s set somewhere else, at another time, and that’s not about me.’”

Hence a “Lucia” for the age of white nationalist rallies and the Jan. 6 insurrection. “The ‘marginalized’ men who used to be in charge, who now think they have to fight for their last shred of dignity — it’s a genuine problem in America,” Stone said. “Everything’s changed: The economy’s fallen apart, and the ideas of masculinity have been turned upside down, and they act out and they create political mischief.”

Caught between the conflicts of men like that is Lucia — her bully of an older brother, Enrico (Artur Rucinski), scheming to keep her from the man she loves, Edgardo (Javier Camarena), and forcing her to marry a more promising match against her will. Driven to murder by it all, she is, Stone said, “a woman trying to survive, to create a future for herself, to be independent, but being ground to dust by the patriarchy around her.”

A COMMON FEATURE of Stone’s hyper-realistic opera productions is a turntable. His sets rotate, changing — sometimes drastically — with each revolution. At the Met, live film gathered by onstage cameras will also be projected above the action, giving the show a split-screen appearance to convey parallel stories and, increasingly, Lucia’s slipping sanity.

“I’ve never had a camera in my face before, but I’ve always somehow been able to think of the acting onstage in a film-like way,” Sierra said. “Maybe that’s because as a kid I did theater. So this is marrying the two sides of me.”

Flexible architecture is also crucial to Stone’s style. In Act II of his “Tote Stadt,” the house of Act I is shattered and surreally spread throughout the stage. Similarly, the town of this “Lucia” begins to match its protagonist’s mind, eventually arriving at a fragmented cluster of buildings in the mad scene.

“The emotional impact of space is transformed continuously depending on what happens there and what angle we look at it from,” Stone said. “The most extreme version of that is when the architecture doesn’t make sense anymore: doors and staircases to nowhere, walking out of a food mart and into a living room.”

Among his inspirations has been the dreamy illogic of Michel Gondry’s film “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” Opera, he said, should be the same: “If it’s going mad, it always feels weird for the production not to go mad.”

Stone was still refining the details in recent rehearsals, with a meticulous eye on the speed of the turntable and whether one of the singers should be wearing a jacket instead of a cardigan. With such specificity, Gelb said, “it’s a show that’s going to keep the Met on its toes.”

Still, Stone said, he eventually had to step back and make room for the music. The conductor, Riccardo Frizza, said that he was aiming to match the production by bringing out “the modernity of this score,” with a focus on transparency and emphases on certain words in the libretto. At the same time he, was also seeking to balance the orchestra’s sound to resemble the historically informed approach he takes at the Donizetti Festival in Bergamo, Italy, where he is the music director.

When a performance snaps into place, Frizza said, the score’s enduring themes emerge naturally: “The way Donizetti builds the whole structure around Lucia from the beginning to the mad scene — he was a great man of theater, but also one important for showing us the whole face of a woman in this opera.”

At the very least, her story speaks to the soprano portraying her. “I’ve been through things, like men trying to control my situation or break my heart or put me through a roller coaster of dominance versus being submissive,” Sierra said. “And that’s really what ‘Lucia’ is about.”

Sierra, who has sung the role before, has found it easier to interpret in a contemporary setting. “It’s more natural than my trying to play someone from the 16th century,” she said. “Now I can do Lucia almost like playing myself. I think the audience is going to feel it a little bit stronger than my portraying a girl of the past.”

That is among the reasons Stone hopes that those who come to see the show will not struggle with it. He went so far as to call the production conservative for its insistence on clarity.

“I don’t think people need to be shocked by it,” he added, “and I don’t think anyone who is watching and listening to the music and being there in the moment, rather than stuck in the past in their mind, won’t have a great time. I’m a show person. I want the audience to have fun.”