TV OPERA REVIEW : Peter Sellars’ Dark View of ‘Cosi fan Tutte’

Most opera companies think Mozart’s “Cosi fan Tutte” is a hoot.

They play it as a cheery, baroque comedy of eros accompanied by complex but pretty tunes. Stressing the playful elements of Lorenzo da Ponte’s libretto, they tell a charming tale of mock infidelity and support the dramma giocoso with a gaggle of sight gags.

“Cosi fan Tutte” works that way. But it isn’t the only way.

Ask Peter Sellars. His approach to this hardy, multifaceted masterpiece really isn’t funny at all. The revolutionary director focuses--with probing dramatic skill and remarkable musical sensitivity--on the pain that lingers beneath the satirical surfaces.

Did I say pain? Make that agony. Make it misery. Make it desperation. . . .

Sellars’ updating of “Cosi,” which will be televised this weekend as part of the “Great Performances” series on PBS, is unrelentingly bleak. On the rare occasions when it dares smile, it does so with derision. (The 3 1/2-hour program airs at 9 p.m. tonight on KVCR Channel 24 and KPBS Channel 15; at 9 p.m. Saturday on KOCE Channel 50, and--more sensibly--at 3 p.m. Sunday on KCET Channel 28.)

In Sellars’ hands, the denouement of the opera--which normally depicts the last-minute reunion of two couples who would rather fight than switch--becomes a multiple mad scene. The protagonists have played too many dangerous emotional games to enjoy a formulaic Happy End. They have indulged in too many deceptions, revealed too many insecurities. They have crossed too many lines, tested too many limits.

Conventional readings of the text suggest quaint sexual stereotyping. All women, we are told, are fickle. In clumsy English, “Cosi fan Tutte” is usually rendered “Women Are Like That” or “All Women Do It.”

“My own favorite translation,” reveals Sellars in his typically overwrought introduction, “is ‘Women Are Bath Mats.’ ”

He calls the “Cosi fan Tutte” “terrifying,” and asks a provocative rhetorical question:

“Is this the most offensive anti-feminist opera ever written, or an exploration of the outer weird edge of the human psyche?”

Ultimately, he goes with the latter.

The action takes place in and around Despina’s Diner, a picturesque seaside eatery set in a chromy forest. It is owned by an embittered Vietnam vet called Alfonso (no Don , here) and run by his wily pal, Despina. The two are enduring a long love-hate relationship.

The diner serves as hang-out for a punkish pair of sisters, Fiordiligi and Dorabella, and their temperamental boyfriends, Ferrando and Guglielmo. There are, apparently, no other customers.

Alfonso tells the women that their lovers must go off to war (a late bit of topical editing makes it reserve duty on the carrier Nimitz en route to Iraq). Actually, the fellows retire to the men’s room, its door wittily marked with Mozart’s silhouette.

They soon soon return ludicrously disguised as a matching pair of Albanian hippies in priapic distress. No one really takes the masquerade seriously until the second act, when the women enter the sexual war game, literally with a vengeance.

They, not the men, make the fateful decision to swap partners. Nothing can ever be the same again.

Sellars accepts no second-hand operatic cliches in his staging scheme, though he indulges in some of his own. Food, as usual, hits the wall when tensions rise. In moments of introspection, the cast often executes mysterious hand signals, and these occasionally evolve into abstract dances. The veristic body language can, as the drama heats, embrace sexual groping.

This is uninhibited, thoroughly modern Mozart. It makes its own kind of sense.

Like the composer, Sellars likes topical references. He turns the quack medico into a chic mystic: none other than Shirley MacLaine. (At a previous Pepsico Festival production, the intruder was Dr. Ruth.) In his jealous diatribe against women, the outraged Guglielmo grabs a mike as if he were a misplaced Geraldo Rivera and canvasses the startled studio audience for support.

Purists will argue, of course, that Sellars often contradicts the letter if not the spirit of the text. He must plead guilty to that charge, even if he doesn’t take it very seriously.

Essentially, he plays the opera on two levels simultaneously. The musical laws are fastidiously observed--the Italian recitatives expressively delineated, the standard cuts opened, the ornamental style respected. At the same time, the drama is reinterpreted in terms vital to the aesthetic sensibilities of contemporary America.

One doesn’t invariably have to approve of Sellars’ liberties to appreciate his imagination and his daring. He refuses to reduce opera to an irrelevant diversion.

He enjoys the collaboration here of dedicated allies. The cast acts with such vivid intensity and such care for ensemble values that one tends to overlook the high quality of most of the singing.

Susan Larson, last seen executing pelvic thrusts as the most boyish of Cherubinos, emerges here as an eloquently vulnerable, exquisitely feverish, utterly feminine Fiordiligi. Apart from some strain in the ascending fioriture of “Come scoglio,” moreover, she sings the impossible music with graceful fluidity. Janice Felty complements her as a poignantly combustible Dorabella who makes the interpolation of a tragic concert aria, “Vado, ma dove,” seem essential.

Frank Kelley is the virtuosic if dry-toned Ferrando, James Maddalena the sympathetically swaggering Guglielmo. Sanford Sylvan’s brooding Alfonso is perfectly counterbalanced by Sue Ellen Kuzma’s knowing Despina.

Craig Smith, the generally underrated conductor, enforces hard-edged verve that inevitably gives way to profound pathos. He reinforces the Sellars concept perfectly. So does Adrianne Lobel, the set designer. So does Dunya Ramicova, who created the costumes. So does Brooks Riley, whose slangy English subtitles play very loose and free with the Italian text.

Ironically, this historic production had to be filmed in Vienna. No American host could provide appropriate funding.