ART plays and participants:
Tuesday, 4/15, 7:30pm, A Streetcar Named Desire with Barbara Drinka
Portland Center Stage plays and participants:
Sunday, 4/6, Matinee (2:00 pm), Sometimes A Great Notion with Scott Murray
Sunday, 5/25, Matinee (2:00 pm), Doubt, A Parable with Duane Dale
OPC at the Theater mentioned on the Portland Center Stage blog!
Destination Opera
By Barbara Drinka, LCSW
This 2007-2008 season, the OPC Arts’ Outreach Committee is partnering with Portland Opera to provide speakers for its intimate opera discussions.
Friday evening, September 7th, psychoanalyst Ralph Beaumont, MD participated in the first of these events, together with Portland University Assoc. Professor of Philosophy and Gender Studies, Jeffrey Gauthier, to discuss the forthcoming opera Carmen. Alexis Hamilton, of Portland Opera moderated a lively discussion that drew a full house
Bizet’s musical score written for Carmen’s voice is exquisite. Carmen is one of several opera heroines who is made to pay with her life, as a punishment for openly displaying her passionate sexual capacities.
The storyline depicts a tale of fearfulness of sexual intimacy between two people, if the woman is not weak, childlike or primarily vulnerable. It is apparent that Bizet, according to Ralph, was “Dead set on having Carmen dead!” Given that, whose tragedy was it? Carmen’s tragedy or Don Jose’s loss? Ralph thought there was fatefulness in Carmen’s death, as unconscious forces were being acted out. Carmen and Don Jose were irresistible to each other because they had each embraced in the other, their own least acceptable sides. Thus, sadism and masochism became the defining dynamic of their relationship.
Ralph mentioned Helena Deutsch’s view of masochism as he continued to explore not just the sadistic side of Carmen, but also the masochistic yearnings in her dynamics. Carmen returned to the rejected and defeated Don Jose at the end to meet her death fate (wish?), just as she had sealed an apparently mutually requitable relationship with the bold, confident toreador, Escamino. Was that possibility of equality too much for her?
The final question from the audience following these rich and collegial offerings by Ralph and Jeff was a concern, “Was it possible that so many layers of meaning represented in this opera, might detract from simply enjoying the music? To that, Ralph commented in his wry signature way, that, to the contrary, understanding would increase the pleasure of the evening so that it was not just a three-hour performance, but more comparable to settling into an evening with a (deliciously complex) book such as War and Peace.
Representing OPC for the second Portland Opera discussion was psychoanalytic candidate and child psychiatrist, Nancy Winters, MD. Opera buffs gathered on a dark autumnal evening in the contemplative space of the Portland Japanese Gardens Pavilion. We were rewarded with stimulating, divergent views of the upcoming Portland Opera presentation of La Cenerentola (Cinderella). Alexis Hamilton again served as moderator for the discussion. PSU Literature Professor, Katya Amato, began the evening by presenting her view that fairy tales did not have enough substance to maintain the interest of most adults. She thought Cinderella was about a Barbie Doll with a wasp-like body, who could only helplessly get what she needed out of life by finding a prince or through materialism.”
Nancy suggested several other possibilities. One is that fairy tales depict the fears of helplessness, isolation, and insecurity universally experienced in the inner lives of children, causing them to turn to fantasy and evolve magical solutions. During the time period that fairy tales were written, many more children than today, experienced parental death or abandonment, experiencing replacement of an idealized parent by a devalued stepparent. Taking the listener into the intrapsychic world, Nancy commented on the childlike solution of dealing with complexity by dividing the world into good and bad, where fairy tales aided the child’s attempt to integrate the two.
She proposed that the tale of Cinderella was in part, a tale of envy. The goodness of Cinderella was so envied by (the other) her stepmother and her stepsisters that they ruthlessly tried to ruin her life and keep her in rags at the hearth. Another explanation is that Cinderella wore rags and devalued herself as protection from the other’s persecution. Or perhaps she wore rags because she had internalized the sisters’ and mother’s projected hate.
What was this goodness that led the sisters to primitive, envious acts of destruction? A possibility is that Cinderella had had a mother who, before her death, could recognize and foster Cinderella’s “true self” development through unconditional love; while the stepsisters were pawns of a narcissistic mother who used her daughters as extensions of herself. In so doing, the sisters were trapped in an undifferentiated twinship state, developing aspects of falseness in their personalities.
Audience members posed their own reflective comments and questions. One suggested that the Prince character was an aspect of Cinderella’s self and representational of her individuation --Cinderella was embracing her own masculinity through her development of a more active, more assertive self. It was a lively, stimulating, evening! Kudos to Nancy for representing current psychoanalytic thought with sikill and aplomb.
