The final new production of a repertory work in the Metropolitan Opera’s 2021-22 season (with the Met premiere of Brett Dean’s Hamlet following next week) is, nominally, of Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. For the record: Riccardo Frizza is the conductor, and the principal roles are sung by Nadine Sierra (Lucia), Javier Camarena (Edgardo), Artur Ruciński (Enrico), and Matthew Rose (Raimondo). The main production credits are: Simon Stone (director), Lizzie Clachan (sets), Alice Babidge and Blanca Añón (costumes), James Farncombe (lights), Luke Halls (projections) and Sara Erde (choreography). The score is rendered near- complete, with the Raimondo/Lucia scene and the Wolf’s Crag scene present, and all the once-standard theatre cuts opened except for the brief exchange between Raimondo and Normanno after the Mad Scene. I saw the second performance of the run, on April 26.

This is the same Stone who auteured the Aix-en-Provence production of Tristan und Isolde I wrote about in Régie-Auteurs Gone Feral (9/3/21, q. v. for some background on him and his working methods). As orientation, I’ll give you a brief description of his work on Lucia, reminding you the while that when I use the movie-derived term “auteur,” as I now most often do, I mean “director who assumes the position of co-creator, or ‘writer anew,’ with total control over all conditions of production and performance (including even the basic ones “given” by the original creators), save for the musical ones.” This Lucia is set in contemporary lower-class America. Partly because of the ethnicity of the protagonist couple, whose faces are in our own onscreen, it often appears to be taking place in an urban Hispanic neighborhood, or possibly a Mafia-controlled blue-collar suburb. But Stone places it “somewhere in America’s Rust Belt.” The set pieces are arrayed around the turntable which, as it rotates, displays a large wooden house, a street and a pickup truck; a motel room; part of a convenience store; part of a chain drugstore; and a movie drive-in showing a ’40s Bob Hope/Dorothy Lamour flick for the two or three cars spaced in its lot. The house is the Ashton residence, standing in for the Lammermoor castle, and the pickup truck is Edgardo’s, standing in for the ruined Wolf’s Crag tower. The set areas are tweaked for the practical requirements of scenes—e. g., outside or inside the motel room, or dressed up with little canopies, tables, and chairs for the wedding festivities.

Above this sluggishly turning merry-go-round is a screen, as wide as the playing area. On it is projected a second narrative of aspects of the opera’s story—not quite an alternate narrative (as in the vidop Tristan, wherein the movie screen was upstage, rather than above the live action), but a supplementary one, bringing us into screen perspective with the characters and showing us what we would otherwise be left to infer of their actions (what happened just before the stage action, just after it, during it, and whatever else is coursing through the auteurial noggin as the gears begin to turn). Also on this screen are the surtitles—a script that is not only (like most) approximate, incongruous in tone, and evasive of anything that might discomfit, however fleetingly, our social norms, but a rewrite that continually lies outright about what is being sung. Its displacement from the text that is the source of the music is complete except in crudest plot outline.