Her Own Agenda

Verdi’s “La Traviata” makes a built-in pitch to the young. Boy and girl fall in love. They steal away to the country. Boy’s father finds the girl, upbraids her and persuades her to leave his son. Agonized, the boy follows, denounces her. She dies, and the son chastises his father as the two stand at her deathbed.

The boy is called Alfredo. The girl, Violetta, is really a high-class courtesan--based on a stupendous real-life French beauty, Marie Duplessis, who for a brief time did live out the plot with author Alexandre Dumas fils.

There are also certain parallels to society’s stiff-necked condemnation of Giuseppi Verdi’s living with Giuseppina Strepponi long before they married.

Even more poignant is that Violetta knows she is dying of consumption. Leaving Alfredo is actually a sacrifice made out of immense love.

Productions of “La Traviata” (The Fallen Woman) often make Alfredo’s father the villain of the piece. But Linda Brovsky, who directs the work for Opera Pacific this week at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, won’t do that.

“Everyone in the opera has an agenda, but they are truly doing the best they can for who they are,” Brovsky, 45, said over a recent lunch at a Costa Mesa restaurant.

“They all think they’re doing what is right. That’s the tragedy. They’re all coming from a place of goodness.”

Verdi’s opus is a work Brovsky has been directing since the beginning of her career. But her approach changed when she visited Paris about 10 years ago and stayed in a hotel across the street from where Duplessis lived.

“Seeing the sheer elegance and the architectural finesse that was in that area, you got a sense of the world this woman lived in,” Brovsky said. “This woman spent money. She lived in a very expensive world.”

A native of Colorado, Brovsky is a summa cum laude graduate of Vassar College with a bachelor’s degree in drama and Russian. She had originally wanted to be a dancer and had even spent a summer as an apprentice with Utah-based Ballet West.

“I loved the discipline, I loved the dancing, I loved the art form,” she said. “But what I didn’t love was the narrowness of the lifestyle because I was interested in too many things.”

Dance has given her an edge in stage directing, however.

“With enormous crowd scenes like we have in ‘Traviata,’ you have to have an instinct for movement. But you also have to memorize movement very quickly to know who’s in the wrong place.

“It’s also been useful for helping singers physicalize things. Singers often don’t get any training in how to deal with their bodies. They’re the ‘disembodied’ voice.”

But audiences today expect more.

“I don’t think [audiences]--especially the younger audiences--will put up with that,” she said. “We are now a TV and Hollywood audience . . . .

“Singers need to recognize this is the reality of their audience, and they need to be more in tune with that and consider their body their instrument, rather than just their voice.”

She sees the director’s role as finding a way to “tell the story in a way that moves an audience [and] maybe causes them to rethink their preconceptions of an old warhorse.

“And beyond that, you hope you inspire your artists.”

That extends beyond the principal singers to include the whole cast.

“I found quotes from the literature of the period or from people of the period and assigned them to every one of the chorus,” Brovsky said. “Here, ‘See what you can do with this. You’re the politician, you’re the banker . . . .’ ”

“Singers [often] start moving in slow motion with the music. So that’s why you see a gesture that hangs out there for five bars. And I say, ‘When have you ever done that in real life? You get to the person and then gesture.

“I try reminding the cast that you must be in real time. Verdi is the internal rhythm. It’s not your physical rhythm. That’s the hard thing.”

After “Traviata,” Brovsky will direct a new production of Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin” opening in March in Kansas City.

After that, she will go to Seattle to direct Rossini’s “Il Barbieri di Siviglia” and later to San Diego to direct Gounod’s “Faust.”

“It’s sort of feast and famine,” Brovsky said. “There will be great offers you were dying to do, but, unfortunately, you were booked three years before to do something else.”

Making her way as one of the few female directors in America was an issue early in her career because she was regarded as, in her words, “the girl.”

“It was, ‘We’ll let ‘the girl’ do [Puccini’s] ‘Butterfly’ because that’s a woman’s piece.’ If you think about it, most of opera is a woman’s piece.

“It’s gotten better. Now the women in the profession joke that we get the calls at 11 o’clock at night, saying, ‘Now, about that rehearsal schedule tomorrow . . . .

“No one ever thinks that maybe we have a life too. Whereas they would never do that with our male colleagues because they’re, of course, home with their family.”

Brovsky does not yet have a family, though.

“I’m still looking for the prince,” she said. “I have several frogs . . . at the moment, but so far we haven’t gotten out of the pond.”

* Opera Pacific presents Verdi’s “La Traviata” tonight, Thursday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. $32-$107. (800) 346-7372.

Chris Pasles can be reached at (714) 966-5602 or by e-mail at chris.pasles@latimes.com.