Working With the Elements in ‘Dutchman’

Rossini goes right to the heart--or to the funny bone. But Wagner can be a hard sell.

“There is nothing more terrible than boring Wagner,” says Keith Warner, who’s directing Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman” for Opera Pacific, opening today and running through Sunday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

“There is nothing more formidable. But that’s why there’s a huge onus on a conductor and director that it cannot and must not be boring.”

Warner was speaking over coffee recently at a hotel in Costa Mesa.

“We’ve got to create interesting, stimulating, well-acted productions that give you a reason for going to the theater. People want stories. They want the experience of art, and opera, actually, when it works, can supply that more powerfully and more magnificently and more convincingly than any other art form. But it’s got to be bloody good. It’s got to be the best.”

Warner, 43, comes to staging Wagner having studied directing and design in 1978 with Friedelind Wagner, the composer’s granddaughter who fled her German homeland and settled in Britain during the rise of the Nazis. Once there, she began running opera workshops for talented students.

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Warner learned the basic principle of design, which is that “of reduction, of discovering what are the essential elements and not over-designing, not designing according to what the realistic locale is, but what the imaginative idea behind the locale was.”

And what would Wagner say about that?

“I think you can’t [worry about] what Wagner or Verdi or Puccini would say is good or what they would say is bad, or what they liked or didn’t,” Warner said. “It’s a ridiculous kind of labyrinth to throw yourself in, imagining what the composer’s intention is, was, or whatever.

“What we have is [the score], and one must work from that. And you must have an imaginative response to that. I mean, we’re artists . . . not a lawyer who’s going to read it as though it’s a contract. The whole idea is that you have an imaginative response.

“The important thing is always to make theater and music as important as possible in the society in which [we] live. . . . It’s a thing that essentially debates the life we lead. But its center should be the center of any community, not some periphery for rich people or a mere entertainment.”

Warner, born in London to working-class parents, was always drawn to the theater and knew when he was 15 he wanted to pursue it professionally.

“I think I was probably pretty insufferable when I think back,” he said. “I remember we had a school poetry competition . . . and my contribution was Sach’s monologue at the end [of Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger”], about ‘High German Art.’

“We had a 20-year reunion just a little while ago, and they all said, ‘Oh my God, you were weird. You were so weird.’ They’d go off to football and I’d be going off to see Olivier doing ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’ or ‘Othello.’ Well, it was great, London in that time, the ‘60s, ‘70s--such great theater.”

Warner’s credits also include nine years at English National Opera, where he rose to become associate director. He worked over a period of about 10 years with John DeMain, first at Houston Grand Opera, now at Opera Pacific. He also worked at Opera Theatre of St. Louis and Opera Omaha, the latter company where he and DeMain served as artistic director, but at different times.

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DeMain will conduct all performances of “Dutchman” here. Mark Delavan sings the title role, while Jeanne-Michele Charbonnet sings Senta. The supertitle translation for “Dutchman,” incidentally, was done by Warner’s wife, Emma, a linguist he married in 1984. They live in London.

Next summer, Warner will create a production of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” for the theater Wagner built in Bayreuth, Germany, to present his own works.

Warner made this “Dutchman” in 1992 for Minnesota Opera, not only directing it but designing it too. His staging is set in a “historical period” but “perhaps a little bit later than was intended, more like Ibsen, Strindberg.

“The elements of the story are there,” he said. “There is a ship, there is a room, there is a cliff to jump off. But by then, the room has exploded, has broken apart . . . .

“Like all of the Wagner operas, it is a location of fantasy--the meeting of worlds, of reality and myth, the bridge between two different realities.

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“I think what Wagner deals with are very much universal psychological and sociopsychological problems,” he continued. “How do you live in the real world if you’re Tristan and Isolde? Isn’t the state of ecstasy and passion that they inhabit in that world, isn’t that perhaps the only thing that’s worth having in life? And if so, how do you make that? Is it possible? That is something that is worth debating.

“ ‘Dutchman’ is about what a community prescribes as being correct behavior, and whether there are some people--or perhaps all of us--who are capable of inhabiting worlds that are greater than the kind of mundane reality of spinning wheels and gossip and chatter. For spinning wheels, read ‘printing presses.’ . . . All this kind of tittle-tattle that we live with.

“Think of all these guru groups and saviors in California, people yearning to find other realities, deeper experiential truth,” he said. “But what degree of sacrifice are you willing to [make to find that]? These may not be questions that everyone finds intriguing, but I do.”

* Opera Pacific’s presentation of Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman” opens today at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. 7:30 p.m. Also 7:30 p.m. Thursday and Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday. $28-$131. (714) 556-2787.