Chappaquiddick Tragedy Retold in Opera

He is the senator. She is Kelly Kelleher, a bright 26-year-old he’d like to be his intern. Here we go again.

Well, yes and no. This is a story we recognize, but one that occurred 29 summers ago. A senator drives off a bridge with his companion into black water. He survives. She drowns.

But here it is not told as it was commonly reported, with the main focus on the senator and the damage to his political career. Novelist Joyce Carol Oates mulled over Chappaquiddick for many years, angry at all the attention and even sympathy given the senator, and finally in 1990 she wrote a small incantatory novel about the incident from the point of view of the young woman, imagining what it was like to die in that black water.

Then composer John Duffy, mulling over potential tragedies to fulfill an opera commission for the American Music Theatre Festival in Philadelphia, struck upon Oates’ “Black Water.” The novelist wrote the libretto, the opera had its premiere last year. And now, L.A. Theatre Works has had the singular idea of turning it into radio drama. A live concert performance with much the same cast as at the premiere (but with the original seven-piece orchestra reduced to violin, cello and piano) was recorded at the Skirball Cultural Center in July and will be broadcast on KCRW-FM (89.9) Sunday evening at 6.

Oates’ book is hallucinatory. In short, jerky chapters, Kelly drowns over and over, as if a videotape were being rewound and replayed. We’re in her mind. She flashbacks to the Fourth of July picnic, where she meets the senator; she flashbacks earlier on her life. She’s innocent, human, appealing. The macho senator is not. Oates’ psychology is dime store, for example when she describes the senator’s aggressive driving as his way of proving his masculinity.

The opera, however, does away with the worst of that interpretation, relying more on conventional narrative. Oates, who wrote the libretto, does manage to keep in some of the psychology with the help of a chorus functioning as in Greek tragedy. But in straightening out the story for the stage, she also becomes more objective. In the opera, the senator appears more sympathetic, less callous. Human frailty is observed in perspective. The tragedy intensifies.

Duffy’s music is not deep, but it nonetheless provides depth. Most distinguished as a composer for upscale television--most notably the PBS documentary “Heritage: Civilization and the Jews”--Duffy has a common touch and an unerring sense of theater. He does in his opera one thing at a time, be it create a mood or heighten speech or propel drama or stop drama for a character’s moment of inner reflection.

If it sounds obvious, even manipulative, it is. And yet “Black Water” sneaks up on a listener. Duffy’s score has a cumulative effect, not only in blotting out some of Oates’ more banal phrases but also in bringing us closer to the characters. It is hard to pinpoint exactly where it happens, or how it happens, but at some point the listener no longer feels like a bemused bystander, watching yet another episode of a Washington soap opera, and becomes caught up in a real opera of universal tragedy. The ending is devastating--and excellent tonic for the nightly news.

The performance is a very good one. Duffy created the roles of Kelly and the senator for Karen Burlingame and Patrick Mason, and they are outstanding representatives of a new breed of versatile American singer able to act; sing opera, musical and new music; and make every word count. It is to their credit but also to that of a convincing cast as a whole that nearly everything in this opera is comprehensible for a radio drama audience. Alan Johnson leads the convincing performance from the piano.

Meanwhile, Duffy, who also happened to found the influential national Meet the Composer program in 1974, which puts composers-in-residence in orchestras around the country, is working on an opera about Muhammad Ali. From the evidence of “Black Water,” he just might pull it off.