‘Man proposes, but [God] disposes’—or so went the biblical proverb as distilled more or less through various Christian medieval iterations.  In this simultaneously sunlit and dark-star doubling of two operas—George Lewis’s and librettist Douglas Kearney’s dark distillation of the W.E.B. DuBois 1920 proto-Afro-futurist (and Afro-pessimist) short story, “The Comet,” pushed up and played against (and in and out of) a pared-down rendering of one of the foundational operas of the classical canon, Claudio Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea—it is as if this fatalistic chain of causality is viewed in reverse.  The ‘gods’ disport, while their human pawns, play at games of dominance, possession, power and pleasure.

Monteverdi’s own Incoronazione plays at ‘doubling’ both in composition and execution—the gods of love and ‘fortune’ (frequently secondary roles for the principals) wreak havoc with their human playthings and messengers, while the principal characters and their accessories plot, scheme, disguise and dissemble in the pursuit of, well—not love exactly—maybe simply a bit of light.  (What would any coronation be without it?)

But Lewis and Kearney have put this doubling at the dark center of The Comet—in striking contrast to the bright, willful, triumphalist glow of Poppea.  The constellation of characters surrounding Poppea and Nero plot and maneuver, disguise themselves and their motives, but know where they stand and where they want to go.  Only the Emperor and Seneca (James Hayden—outstanding voice and stage presence), his counselor and former tutor—in essence the opera’s ‘conscience’ (standing in for what might—but obviously cannot—be Nero’s own) and its voice of Stoic virtue—have neither need nor inclination to be anything but themselves.  Not so simple for the characters of The Comet, and more specifically for Jim (Cedric Berry):  working class, clever but poor—and Black.  In 1920s Manhattan, he is that ‘invisible man’ made suddenly visible amid masses of dead men in the wake of a comet’s freakish brush with some part of New York.  From a vault that might have become a tomb, he has found his way to the street, and up an elevator to a still-elegant restaurant.  Yet in what amounts to a mass displacement—unlike his privileged ‘foil’ (Ottone) on the other side of history in Poppea, returning “like a line to the center”—he has a clarified sense of place in this ruined landscape.  “Where I come from, disaster is a home away from home,…”  But the immediacy of his experience of the past, has not disappeared.  “Now the avenue is crowded with the silence in my ear / and yesterday they would not have served me here.”

While the demigods of Fortune, Virtue, and Love (Joelle Lamarre—superb) contend with each other over the four-way tango between Nero (Anthony Roth Costanzo), Poppea (Joanna Lynn-Jacobs, Nardus Williams in the June 16th performance) Ottone (Amanda Lynn Bottoms—who doubles as Virtue), and the out-going empress, Ottavia (Whitney Morrison), the practical New Yorker pushes himself past the dead, finds emergency flares and heads to the building’s roof.  But predictably, the next arrival is no less random—however appropriately dressed for the setting:  a woman (Julia—Kiera Duffy), elegantly attired (the costumes—by Oana Botez—are sumptuous), but reeling in shock—and white.  Seeming to take stock of the situation, the two survivors are also—only slightly less consciously—taking stock of each other.  Meanwhile in the sunlit domain of the mythically aspiring ancients, Poppea’s seductive spin on the dynamics of power and perception becomes an ironic counterpoint to what is unfolding in the soft lights of this posh restaurant.

“You say you see me. / You don’t see me. / Hidden in your heart, / I cannot be seen by your eyes.”

(The selected arias and duets from L’incoronazione di Poppea were sung in the original Italian–rendered for brevity and clarity in the English translation of the super-title cards.)

Poppea sings this against the brightly lit, tiled and imposingly stepped set for the Monteverdi opera—appropriate to a court ritual, an offering to the gods, or a luxury spa.  (It’s a Roman bath that might easily become a sarcophagus.)  In the dim light of the restaurant interior (on the other side of the circular, turntable stage), it is glaringly apparent that Jim is seen as more than slightly incongruous.  “Have you had to work hard?” Julia asks Jim?  Her question is already answered by Jim’s physical presentation; and his one-word response discloses nothing further.  Lewis and Kearney use Poppea’s and Nero’s duet as a kind of echo to the “double-consciousness” at play here.  (“You see me always, / yet you never see me.”) Place and placement are a kind of imprisonment here, regardless of the circumstances.  Where Jim might be seen in one ‘light’ on the street, working in a bank vault, he is seen in quite another in an establishment of luxury consumption; and he clearly judges that distance, that displacement.  Responding to Julia’s newfound perspective, “How foolish our human distinctions seem—now….” he underscores the social and racial brutality of his uncertain status in the 1920s—all the more striking against the plush rose and gold velvet Art Deco acanthus wall-covering of the restaurant backdrop.  “Yes—I was not human, yesterday.”

The glass ‘windows’ and the elevator are important details.  Lewis and Kearney—together with the production team’s superb scenic designer, Mimi Lien—have made the luxe restaurant a kind of telescopic vessel poised at an ambiguous remove from the mortal world below.  Jim is also a kind of messenger (the program’s original cast credits list him as ‘Jim/Mercury’)—signaling to Manhattan and the boroughs beyond that life endures in at least one New York neighborhood; and the counterpoint between the two operas emphasizes the fraught ambiguity of the messaging.  The message—whether to Seneca (or Seneca’s own admonitions to Nero) or Jim’s flares to the world beyond Manhattan—can only signal, not predict.

While Lewis’s score for The Comet sings of disaster and displacement, the counterpoint between the two scores seems to highlight the more interior oppositions and contradictions.  Love and Fortune both are gods of chaos here; yet Love inevitably lends insight to Virtue.  But the ‘triumph of love’ (or imperial whim) is brief (as history bears out).  Neither the world of the Roman Empire nor any other will be ‘acting on Love’s commands’ any time soon.  Lewis and Kearney, alongside director Yuval Sharon, emphasize the fickle transit of these ‘gods’ through these terrestrial and cosmic landscapes—each of them happy to step out of Nero’s Rome (and off the slowly revolving stage) only to step into Du Bois’s 1920s New York moments later.  As Ottavia shoves off to obscure refuge, the gods celebrate both Poppea’s destiny and simultaneously Jim’s and Julia’s seeming meeting of hearts and minds—a moving but short-lived moment that makes for a bitter contrast with both operas’ finales.  Hope is less a brilliant jewel than the bitter pill that must be swallowed.