Breaking Down the Barriers

Watching television is an act of voyeurism. The screen is another window in our homes. We stare at and peer at the world outside. Sometimes we pay attention; just as often, it’s a glowing and gibbering electronic background.

Opera, on the other hand, is an art form that asks us in. Through music we permit the outer world to disappear while we penetrate, possibly even experience, deeper inner lives. When opera comes on television, it can easily lose what it is that makes it opera.

But if opera rarely makes good television, television can make arresting opera, as Mikel Rouse’s “Dennis Cleveland” proved Tuesday night when it began a five-day run in the small black-box Founders Hall of the Orange County Performing Arts Center. Rouse, a 42-year-old composer with experience in classical music and art rock, has discovered that the emotional outbursts on a television talk show are not only as powerfully operatic as those at a 19th century party but very similar to those in, say, the parties in “La Traviata.” People blow up, relationships unravel, the crowd takes sides.

“Dennis Cleveland” is not the first opera of a television show; it is not the first opera to use live video; it is not the first opera to find in TV dialogue the seed for operatic utterance. John Moran created a surreal performance-art opera out of the Jack Benny program a decade ago. Peter Sellars would not be Peter Sellars these days if the characters in his opera productions were denied video cameras. Most importantly, Robert Ashley, in his epic “Perfect Lives,” demonstrated, in an amazing operatic sleight of hand, that bland, banal television characters could grow dimensions.

Rouse dedicated “Dennis Cleveland” to Ashley, and it was first produced three years ago at the Kitchen in New York, where Moran and Ashley are also regulars. But “Dennis Cleveland” is a new evolution of these influences as well as something that we have never really had before--a genuine rock opera. From “Tommy” through “Rent” and “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” rock music has functioned the way music does in a Broadway musical: It explains and amplifies character and dramatic situation but does not control and resolve the drama. In “Dennis Cleveland,” music takes charge.

We enter Founders Hall as if members of a studio audience for Jerry or Oprah. The stage is a talk-show set with monitors and video cameras. Rock music plays softly in the background. We are prepped about applause by the crew and the host comes out to give a few words of welcome before the show begins.

Rouse is Dennis--slick, affable, empathetic, handsome. The guests are four couples, a cross-section of Americans and all damaged goods. Other cast members are planted among us in the audience. Much of what comes out of their mouths is actual talk-show dialogue. The setup and the characters are convincing. The music, if you don’t listen too closely, can sometimes trick you into thinking it is pop. There is an incessant drumbeat.

But, in fact, it is all a trick. The words are transformed into poetry. The drama elevates garish television catharsis into the high theater of character transformation and revelation. The music, one only slowly begins to notice, is highly sophisticated, using imaginative harmonies, contrapuntal techniques (even fugue!), complex overlays of rhythm and Minimalist phasing, rap and hip-hop. It is a musical language substantial enough to make statements, direct enough to make theater.

There is also a spectacular fluidity to “Dennis Cleveland.” Characters on stage are individuals who function also as Greek chorus. Their stories are only understood through the comments of the audience members who are ostensibly telling their own. Cleveland, constantly on the move through the audience, acts as everyone’s emotional sponge absorbing psychic hurts, until all these characters come to seem projections of his own psychic disarray. Every barrier you can possibly think of has been broken down--between audience and actors, between pop and art music, between fantasy life and harsh reality, between naturalist theater and surreal poetry.

An inspired cast further helps point “Dennis Cleveland” toward an exciting new future for American opera. Working together brilliantly are television actors, opera singers, Broadway performers, rock musicians, even academics, and some unlikely combinations of the above. Among them, for instance, are David Barron, a composer who has studied with Elliott Carter and performs Sondheim, and the riveting rap artist Eric Smith, lead singer of the Fly Boys. The set and video design are by John Jesurun. “Dennis Cleveland” is part of the Eclectic Orange Festival presented by the Philharmonic Society of Orange County. It was an act of courage and vision to produce it.

* “Dennis Cleveland” continues tonight through Saturday, 8 p.m., $25. Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, (949) 553-2424.