‘Park’ Fails to Keep Operatic Promise

In “Central Park,” three short new American operas broadcast tonight on “Great Performances,” the play is very much the thing.

The triptych of operas came from a trio of trios--three commissioners (Glimmerglass Opera, New York City Opera and PBS), three playwrights (Wendy Wasserstein, A.R. Gurney and Terrence McNally) and three composers (Deborah Drattell, Michael Torke and Robert Beaser).

That order isn’t arbitrary. First came the concept of a set of operas set in Central Park; then, the approach to famous playwrights; finally, the selection of emerging composers. When an intended collaboration between McNally and Aaron Kernis turned prickly, it was the composer who was expendable.

There was, of course, also an eye to television. The production by Mark Lamos is lifelike, and all the singers are exceptional actors. For a Bocelli-besotted PBS, this might well be considered a stretch. (When is the last time an American network was involved in commissioning opera?) But these three sung plays, with music of varying quality, are barely a small step for an art form.

The first segment, “The Festival of Regrets” by Drattell and Wasserstein, is a modern-day relationship opera that introduces us both to the fact that these will be works about New York characters turned into caricatures and to the singers, who will reappear in the later operas.

A middle-aged divorced woman runs into her former husband during a Rosh Hashana ceremony at the Bethesda Fountain, and they find that maybe they can work it out. Divorced woman and mother pick at each other. Ex has a bored young girlfriend (former baby-sitter). The park is full of New Yorkers with attitude.

Drattell, composer-in-residence for Glimmerglass and City Opera, underlines drama with watery klezmer clarinet and violin lines that float like doughy matzo balls in a canned broth. Wasserstein’s text is droll but prosaic, uninteresting to sing, and Drattell’s vocal style has a Morse-code instance on longs and shorts. The deadly opera question arises: Why are these people singing?

“Strawberry Fields” has some promising music by Torke and a stunning performance by Joyce Castle as an elegant society matron who wanders into the park under the delusion that she is at the opera. A young student (Jeffrey Lentz) befriends her; impatient yuppie son and daughter want to remove her to a nursing home.

Torke’s music is distinctive, its exciting rhythmic bite and alluring post-minimalist fracturing of melody sweep us along. He writes beautifully for voice and builds to a climactic ensemble that really is Verdian in its vitality and intricacy.

But Torke can be susceptible to sentimentality, and Gurney’s play sentimentally glamorizes senility. Still, Castle captures the formal tone of a certain kind of almost-extinct society woman with utter fidelity and touching warmth. And Torke handles even such uninspired lines as “and music is the magnet that draws us together” in a catchy manner.

Still, the music is simply incapable of rising above the play. Torke is a bright, singular composer and here displays a genuine talent for opera; the opera world owes him better opportunity.

In McNally’s “The Food of Love,” for which Beaser supplied the music, a homeless woman tries to give her baby away. No one--not cop, real estate agent with cell phone, au pair with snotty child in tow, zookeeper or yet another pompous yuppie couple--wants it.

This is a creepy subject, and Beaser’s music is maudlin. Early on, as the woman sings a lullaby to her baby, the sound of a (heavenly?) chorus comes out of nowhere to extend spiritual sustenance. This woman believes her child to be the next savior. Lauren Flanagan portrays her with gripping fervor, but mawkish music prevents any ascension into holiness.

True to its mission, “Central Park,” which was filmed last summer at Glimmerglass, has a cast of singers who, without exception, make every word, every dramatic gesture, of these playlets intelligible.

Nevertheless the broadcast so mistrusts music that it employs subtitles to further emphasize story. Stewart Robertson fulfills his too-often thankless conducting duties well.

* “Central Park” airs tonight at 9 on KCET.