A THOUSAND ACRES

July 9 7:30 PM July 13 7:30 PM July 17 2:00 PM July 19 7:30 PM July 22 7:30 PM

Music by KRISTIN KUSTER Libretto by MARK CAMPBELL Based on the novel A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley

World Premiere: Des Moines Metro Opera; July 9, 2022 Performed in English with English supertitles

Leadership funding provided by Linda and Tom Koehn

WARNING: A Thousand Acres contains material on the subjects of sexual assault, incest and suicide. RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline: 800-656-HOPE National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 800-273-8255 CICS Your Life Iowa Crisis Line: 855-581-8111

THE STORY

PROLOGUE

Ginny sits on the front steps of her father’s house and realizes this is the last time she’ll see their farm. Memories from her childhood begin to surface, but she quickly pushes them away and decides to move forward.

ACT I

SCENE 1: Three years earlier. At a gathering of friends and family, Larry Cook suddenly announces he will divide his farm among his three daughters. Ginny and Rose acquiesce but Caroline demurs, not wanting to give up her new life in Des Moines. Larry tells her she’s out and shuts the door in her face. SCENE 2: Later that night, Ginny and her husband Ty discuss the future and Ty’s big plans. After he falls asleep, Ginny dreams of a baby, even after so many miscarriages. SCENE 3: Making breakfast for her father, as she does every morning, Ginny enthuses about the future of the farm while Larry broods. In a sudden outburst, Larry accuses Ginny and her sister Rose of turning Caroline against him. SCENE 4: Ginny greets the recently returned Jess Clark, a neighbor’s son, while he is out running. He tells her about his 13 years away from the farm, and they make a connection. SCENES 5-6: Ginny and Rose celebrate Rose’s recovery from breast cancer. Rose makes Ginny promise that if anything should ever happen to her, Ginny will take care of Rose’s daughters, Pammy and Linda. The sisters decide to host a family game night and invite Jess Clark. During the Monopoly game that evening, they discuss Larry’s increasingly strange behavior, and Rose hints at a dark family secret. SCENE 7: On a walk in the fields behind her house, Ginny and Jess begin a love affair. SCENE 8: Ginny confronts her father about his drinking and showing up at Caroline’s office unannounced. Larry accuses her of turning Caroline against him and vows to get the farm back. SCENE 9: Another Monopoly game is interrupted by the news that Larry has had a minor car accident while driving drunk. Unrepentant, Larry rages at Ginny and Rose, calling them whores, and runs off into the approaching storm.

INTERMISSION ACT II

SCENE 1: Early the next morning, after the storm, Rose tries to get Ginny to admit that Larry sexually abused them as children. Ginny denies it. Ty and Pete return from their search without Larry, who has taken refuge with the neighbors. SCENE 2: Ginny and Ty learn that Larry is suing them to get the farm back. Harold, their next-door neighbor, and Marv, the family lawyer, suggest that Ginny and Rose should apologize to their father, lest the neighbors begin to talk. Ginny refuses and vows to keep up appearances. Ty takes Larry’s side and Ginny is incredulous at his reaction. SCENE 3: Later that day, while making the bed in her childhood home, Ginny is overcome with memories of being sexually abused by Larry as a child. SCENE 4: Several weeks later, Ginny learns that Pete, Rose’s husband, has killed himself under the strain of running the farm and their troubled marriage. Rose leaves her two daughters, Pammy and Linda, in Ginny’s care while she goes to identify Pete’s body. Ginny struggles to distract the girls while keeping such a devastating secret. SCENE 5: On another walk in the fields, Jess decries the abuse of the land around them. Ginny admits to Jess that she has fallen in love with him, but he does not return her feelings and pushes her away. SCENE 6: The night before the trial, Rose begins to melt under the pressure of the lawsuit. Ginny tries to calm her, but Rose vows the patriarchal legacy will stop with their generation. Ginny is left stunned by the news that Rose and Jess have begun an affair. SCENE 7: Ginny and Ty win the legal case but their marriage falls apart. Ty accuses Ginny of betraying him by lying about her miscarriages and bitterly complains about all of the secrets that have come to light. Fed up with all of it, Ginny leaves.

EPILOGUE

Three years later. Rose and Larry are both dead, and Ginny is raising Rose’s daughters. The farm has been lost, and Ginny and Caroline are dividing up what is left. After giving Caroline everything that’s left, Ginny leaves the farm for good.

PRODUCTION

Conductor DAVID NEELY Stage Director KRISTINE MCINTYRE Scenic and Projection Design LUKE CANTARELLA * Costume Design VALÉRIE THÉRÈSE BART * Lighting Design KATE ASHTON Make-Up/Hair Design KELLEN M. EASON * Associate Conductor MATTHEW STRAW * Musical Preparation YASUKO OURA Assistant Stage Director JANINE MORITA COLLETTI Stage Manager BRIAN AUGUST

* DMMO mainstage debut † Former DMMO Apprentice Artist

CAST in order of vocal appearance

Ginny ELISE QUAGLIATA † Pete TAYLOR STAYTON Pamela MARA STOA * Linda ANSLEY MASON * Rose SARA GARTLAND † Marv Carson WEI WU * Jess JOHN MOORE † Harold KRISTOPHER IRMITER Ty KEITH PHARES * Caroline GRACE KAHL † Larry ROGER HONEYWELL

FROM THE MAESTRO by David Neely, Conductor

The sound of a voice. Alone. Recalling. The orchestra enters with the quiet, undulating sound of distant memory. We are transported into the past with a cheerful guitar song. The music gently bounces in conversation, then filters down to a flowing lullaby as sisters reflect on the unchanging nature of farm life. The tempo broadens, the harmonies become tinged with melancholy, the vocal lines arch, yearningly reach their peak, and then quietly resign themselves back to reality. We are IN.

Mood break. The musical pace brightens in a river of eighth notes under playful conversation. Guests arrive. The sound of the broad plains proudly cuts in. A speech, full of confidence and pride, followed by unexpected hesitancy, is reflected in orchestral stillness. Sisters begin to argue, slowly at first. Emotions rise, the heartbeat in the orchestra accelerates, the harmonies plead. The three voices intertwine, steadily rising in tessitura. It is at once unnerving and gorgeous, striving toward a resolution that does not come. Full stop. An anxious string tremolo rises and ebbs. Angry words, spoken, bring it to a stop. “Then you’re out.” Pause. The orchestra begins a reflective interlude.

Thus runs the opening Kristin Kuster’s first fulllength opera. A composer of note in the orchestral world with a growing resume of vocal works, Kristy (as we have fondly come to know her) gets it. Story, emotions, timing, process, voices, orchestra, the joy of collaboration on something meaningful and true. All of it. Cast, orchestra, and I have reveled in taking ownership of her music, of unlocking for the audience what she has so astutely brought to life. It’s been an unspeakably rewarding experience that has forged a lasting bond between creators and performers—a family, but unlike the family of the story, one glowing with warmth and unified purpose.

ELISE QUAGLIATA

SARA GARTLAND

GRACE KAHL

ROGER HONEYWELL

KEITH PHARES

TAYLOR STAYTON

JOHN MOORE

WEI WU

KRISTOPHER IRMITER

STRETCHES TO THE HORIZON

BY KRISTINE MCINTYRE, DIRECTOR

THE CHOICE OF A Thousand Acres as the subject for an opera company in Iowa should come as no surprise. Set on an Iowa farm in the late 1970s, this retelling of the King Lear story seems the perfect melding of subject matter and locale. Jane Smiley is a writer with deep ties to the Midwest, and the novel won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

It is a story with great scope, with the iconic American image of family farm as its backdrop. The setting is modern enough for us to easily recognize the characters and their stories but distant enough to lend it some universality. It has a central female protagonist and distinctive female characters to enrich a modern opera canon in desperate need of them. And it seemed the perfect choice to satisfy the best piece of advice that we were given as we embarked on this quest—that the opera should have resonance for the local audience who have supported the company throughout its fifty-year history.

Jane Smiley spent almost two decades in Iowa, first as an MFA student at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop/ University of Iowa and later, after finishing her PhD, as a Professor of English at Iowa State University. It was during these years that she began to think seriously of writing a book that brought together several different areas of interest: a growing concern about the use of pesticides in industrial agriculture and what it was doing to the land, a desire to explore dysfunctional families and a continuing interest in feminist theory. And, of course, there was King Lear.

Like many of us, Smiley read King Lear in high school and college. The play disturbed her—Lear talked too much, endlessly pontificating and defending himself—and Smiley was annoyed that Goneril and Reagan didn’t get to tell their point of view. These female characters are often held up as archetypal examples of angry and ungrateful daughters, but Smiley understood there was more to it. She thought she knew why they were so angry, and she wanted to give that suspicion a voice.

I, too, recognized that Goneril and Reagan were getting the short end of the stick. In college my English professor would strut around the room enthusiastically shouting, “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child,” which my professor took as a statement of fact. But Smiley knew that Goneril and Reagan were not thankless. They had been wronged, horribly so, by their father and she was going to tell their story. “Women who are that angry all share the same background. I wanted to shape their experiences into the plot so there would be hope at the end of the novel that some of them could go forward, into life.”

The setting for A Thousand Acres— the fictional Zebulon County—was inspired by the countryside about an hour north of Ames. Driving back from Minneapolis along Interstate 35, Smiley looked out the car window and was struck by the strange, flat, spooky landscape. The farms there had been built in an area that was once marshland. Through the use of agricultural tiles, the immigrants who settled the area had drained the water and reclaimed more than 12 feet of topsoil. The result was farms that were incredibly large, productive and worth fighting for. “This is the place,” Smiley said, “to set that Lear book.”

A Thousand Acres is a first-person narrative. It is through Ginny, the eldest Cook daughter, that Smiley explores not only the events of the story but the very nature of memory and how narratives of self can fracture and need to be rebuilt. Ginny barely remembers her mother who, like Lear’s wife, has been largely erased from her daughters’ lives. Alone in her father’s house, Ginny seeks to reclaim her. She has vague doubts about the myth of how her family assembled the thousand acres—the

Crib Flare (2020) by Amee Ellis.

Cooks’ rise to greatness—and she struggles to reconcile her memories with the accepted version of the story. And for much of the novel, Ginny has repressed the memory of her sexual abuse at the hands of her father, despite her sister Rose’s insistence that it did happen, first to Ginny and then to Rose herself. But later, alone in her childhood bedroom, the memories return in a sudden and violent flood, laying bare all the lies that have been buried for so many years.

This is memory as a form of resistance— resistance to abuse, to the erasure of women’s lives, to ownership of Ginny’s body, to the rewriting of her history, as critic Sinead McDermott has observed. Just as her ancestors reclaimed the farmland from the sea beneath, so Ginny reclaims and rediscovers her story and her sense of self. All the proper names in the novel—Cook, Carson, Clark, Ericson, Lewis, Pike, Zebulon—are those of explorers and conquerors. Larry Cook, the patriarch, is well-named and well-placed in this pantheon. But so is his eldest daughter, Ginny Cook, who writes an entirely new story for herself and for her nieces far from the farm, the thousand acres and its poisoned legacy.

I first read A Thousand Acres almost 30 years ago. I loved Smiley’s clever use of the Lear story, but even more I loved her crafting of an American family saga on a grand scale. Four years ago Michael Egel asked me for ideas for the subject of our new opera. I suggested A Thousand Acres. New American opera is a chance to tell our stories, and this one seemed particularly suited to the opera stage— and fortunately Jane Smiley agreed.

A Thousand Acres is an opera dependent on a sense of the land around us, and so it was clear that we needed a composer who was attuned to the natural world, to the seasons and the weather, and who was interested in rendering those aspects of the story in her music. But equally she needed to have a sense of interior landscape and be able to explore the emotional breadth of these deeply troubled characters. And it seemed both right and fitting that the work of a great female novelist should be set by a vibrant and skillful female composer.

I knew we had found that composer when I first heard Kristin Kuster’s Rain On It, an orchestral celebration of a rainstorm and its aftermath, and Myrrha, a striking and much darker piece for soprano, orchestra and male chorus. Known for her driving, minimalist rhythms and exuberant use of percussion, Kuster is a bold composer with full command of the orchestra. Her work has a modern American sound but with a dissonance which I find to be both extremely appealing and exactly right for this material. Her choices, especially of instrumentation, are often unexpected, surprising, even jarring, but always on point. She is an intuitive composer who sets not only the obvious meaning of the text but also the darker, emotional undertones through her use of orchestral color. Orchestral interludes separate many of the scenes, representing the passage of time and Ginny’s shifting relationships to her family and their land. The early interludes describe the arrival of full summer— abundant, verdant and full of joy— and speak to an idyllic childhood on the farm. But Larry’s music soon invades as Ginny becomes full of disquiet. The music becomes more slippery, and dissonant harmonies emerge. Long, plaintive lines of solo strings are violently interrupted by marimba and drums, insistently driving the music to an explosion for full orchestra, as though it cannot be contained any longer. Woodwinds and strings cascade relentlessly over one another, like the water beneath the land, threatening to wash everything away. Musical themes representing Ginny, Larry, and the farm are woven throughout the score, then manipulated and inverted as Ginny comes to recognize the truth about her family and her past. Nothing in this story is as it first seems; nothing is on solid ground, and that is as true of the music as it is of the characters themselves.

Kuster is, I think, a brave composer, particularly in starting the entire opera with a solo voice, a cappella, devoid of any of the lush orchestral writing for which she is known. But what better way to ensure that it is Ginny’s voice we hear as she tells us her story? In this, Kuster is a fitting match for the brave female novelist who dared to take on one of the most iconic, influential, and patriarchal of plays in the theatrical canon, rewrite it, set it in Iowa, and tell her new story in a woman’s voice.

Framing this story as a memory play, with a prologue and epilogue, was just one of the important choices that librettist Mark Campbell made as he adapted the novel to the operatic stage. Such a framework is not an uncommon theatrical device, but it is particularly useful in this first-person narrative as it introduces Ginny as our point of reference for the storytelling. The memory play then requires that

Shadow Bin (2020) by Amee Ellis.

Ginny be in every scene and renders the opera a true tour-de-force for the singer tasked with creating her. Such a complex book was always going to require a large number of scenes and locations, but Campbell has effectively concentrated the characters and the action and keeps the focus on the farm itself. The world outside almost ceases to exist. Indeed, the farm is Ginny’s world and so it seems appropriate that we never see her beyond its boundaries until the very end.

A seasoned librettist, Campbell encouraged the writing of ensembles in the opera, creating several opportunities for duets between Ginny and Rose, a trio for the three sisters, and a quartet between the couples that demonstrates a rare moment of familial harmony which is handled beautifully by Kuster. Campbell also chose to pair the scenes in the opera in a unique and meaningful way. A scene early in the opera often has a second, darker counterpart or is inverted in some fashion. The breakfast scenes in Larry’s kitchen, the monopoly games, Jess and Ginny’s walks in the field, the scenes on Ginny’s porch, and even the bedroom scenes follow this pattern. The pairings highlight the sense of routine, at once comforting and monotonous, that has been a hallmark of Ginny’s life thus far.

But they also illustrate how unstable that foundation truly is. In short order, the repeated scenes go awry and take their dark twists and turns. Again, nothing is as it seems or should be. Ginny’s confusion and sense that the future is slipping away from her is woven into the very structure of Campbell’s libretto.

Creating an opera in the place that it is set brings unique challenges, especially when that opera is so deeply related to the land itself. Knowing that a different visual perspective on the Iowa landscape might be incredibly useful, I was intrigued when I came across an image of a wide but lonely farm with a bright horizon and gathering storm clouds overhead. The photograph, entitled Mingo, was by Iowa photographer Amee Ellis and seemed to have uncanny resonance with the story of A Thousand Acres. Ellis lives in Des Moines and has farming in her blood. She is particularly attuned to the subtle beauty of this landscape which she photographs mostly in black and white. Her use of film and old manual cameras make her photographs feel both old and new, of past and present, gritty but luminous in their silver gelatin prints. We invited Ellis to create a series of photographs from the perspective of each of the three Cook daughters, and the result was a beautiful study entitled The Sea Beneath Our Feet. Describing it, Ellis has written, We are shaped by our landscape and it is shaped by us. Our memories live in the soil, some buried so deeply we forgot we planted them.

Water is one of the most surprising and important themes in A Thousand Acres, and Smiley uses it throughout the novel. It is a metaphor for the mutability of memory and Ginny’s shifting recollection of the events of her childhood. It also speaks to the farmland itself, where sudden storms can threaten all that is in their path, or the water beneath the soil can rise at any time and wash everything away. This idea of impermanence and the impending flood has inspired Kuster’s music, Ellis’s photographic study, and also Luke Cantarella’s scenic and projection design. “The grass is gone now,” Smiley writes, “and the marshes, ‘the big wet prairie,’ but the sea is still beneath our feet, and we walk on it.”

When I asked her recently in an interview what she thought of the idea of turning her novel into an opera, she was incredibly supportive. “The advantage of opera, as opposed to a play, is that they can sing what they think, and that has a quality of introspection that is hard to arrive at on the stage.” Opera, she thought, would elevate the characters and the story. “I’ve never seen an opera that didn’t lift the spirits of the audience no matter how horrible and horrifying the events in the opera were,” Smiley assured me. “All you need is music.”

Mingo (2018) by Amee Ellis.