THE HANDMAID'S TALE—A Bleak Future at SF Opera

Handmaids' Dystopia makes for a grim experience

By Jeff Dunn

If you’re in the mood for a well-done dose of despondency, Poul Ruder’s The Handmaid’s Tale, now playing at the San Francisco Opera, is just the ticket. Prepare with a quick re-read of 1984 and Animal Farm. Then, you’ll be ready to show up and experience an impressive array of artists doing their very best to show you some of the very worst that could happen to this country.

Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel posits a future (2014 in the book, 2030 in the current opera production) where a worldwide infertility disease, environmental degradations, and nuclear disasters have created enough social instability to allow a puritanical cult to mastermind a coup of the U.S. government. As a result, a “Republic of Gilead” is created and put under martial law.

Next, claiming that infertility is God’s punishment for women’s sinfulness, women are progressively deprived of most of their rights, including reading and writing, and forcibly separated into classes depending on their ability to procreate and other factors. Fertile women are designated as “Handmaids,” forced to have intercourse with upper-class men whose wives have been unable to produce children — and then forced to surrender their babies.

Ruder’s music is utterly appropriate to this dismal situation. Written from 1996 to 1998 in a late Modernist orchestral style, with drone bass lines, accretionary tone clusters, and periodic fusillades from the brass. Vocal lines are relatively simple in comparison, but nothing you’d want to sing in the shower.

A cultural icon of melody (“Indian’s Farewell,” now known as “Amazing Grace”) can be detected in several instances, where it adds a bitter irony to the cult’s pseudoreligion. For some, the music may become as hard to bear as the gross indignities and devasting losses suffered by the opera’s characters.

Mezzo-soprano Irene Roberts portrays the central Handmaid sufferer “Offred.” In such a production I cannot imagine a better performance than the way she passes on her anguish, travails, failing hopes, and powerlessness to listeners. Bass John Relyea adds a rich sound and complexity to the bad-guy role of Offred’s Commander and would-be impregnator.

Mezzo-soprano Lindsay Ammann adds a special poignancy to her portrayal of the Commander’s jealous wife. Soprano Rhoslyn Jones’ sweetness is a welcome contribution to her part as Offred’s shopping partner Ofglen. And soprano Sarah Cambidge’s fearful stridency is perfect in her projection of how, given a little power, oppressed women are happy to subjugate other women.

Conductor Karen Kamensek carefully handled the score’s complexities and did not stint at providing a full dynamic range of occasionally terrifying sounds. Chloe Lamford’s sets were spare and utilitarian in foreground, but massive where needed in portraying the huge “Hanging Wall” where traitors’ bodies remind viewers of the cost of cult disobedience. Will Duke’s large projections were especially apt in personalizing the loss of Offred’s pre-coup daughter.

The Handmaid’s Tale serves as a very unpleasant object lesson on the perversion of authority and psychology. San Francisco Opera’s production is true to Atwood’s vision. Fortunately, since the United States is still a free country, attendance is optional.