Thursday, November 17, 2011

Movies, Opera Reveal The Strength Of Intuition


Every time I drive past the marquee at the Lark Theater, I’m tickled by the lineup for this weekend. Brad Pitt as Billy Beane; George Clooney as a presidential contender; plus a special appearance by Gandhi. It’s very guy-centric, this lineup, but still … sports, politics and money, with music for one of the 20th century’s most renowned figures by today’s most famous composer—what a mix!


Moneyball, of course, stars Pitt as Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane, who, using computer analysis to draft players, put together a team of contenders in 2002. Rene Rodriguez of the Miami Herald calls it a “triumph of culturally relevant filmmaking.” Roger Ebert says the film is about “the war between intuition and statistics.”

That phrase certainly applies to The Ides of March, in which Ryan Gosling’s idealistic staffer gets a crash course in yucky real-life politics while on the campaign trail.
But who would have thought the term would suit the latest offering in the Live at the Met series as well? Satyagraya — the name alone informs you this isn’t an opera by Handel or Verdi. Nope, it’s by Philip Glass, arguably the only living composer the general audience has heard of (for, say, the soundtrack for Mishima or Koyaanisqatsi, or maybe for Glass’s first opera, Einstein at the Beach. This one, which premiered in 1980, is his second). As usual, Glass makes heavy use of arpeggios and repetition to create a hallucinatory spell, and much of the music is gorgeous. 


There’s no straightforward plot or chronology here; we’re shown episodes from Gandhi’s years in South Africa, when he was a young lawyer protesting British injustice, as moments in time. Unlike traditional opera, this is sung in Sanskrit — the language of the Bhagavad Gita, on which the text is based — and instead of supertitles, isolated words and lines are projected onto the set or props. And the staging is wonderful. The set is a semicircular wall covered in what looks like corrugated metal, in front of which we see oversized puppets and fanciful props, aerialists and stilt walkers, in addition to the well-reviewed singers. 


The opera portrays the passing of the legacy of nonviolence from Tolstoy through Gandhi to Martin Luther King, Jr. — a topic discussed as recently as today at the Occupy sites. We’d all like to see a better means of achieving political ends — surely we all feel there must be a better way. With its message of pacifism, you might call Satyagraya the triumph of intuition over statistics.


IF YOU GO: Nov. 19 and 20, Satyagraha; through Nov. 22, Moneyball and The Ides of March, Lark Theater, 549 Magnolia Ave., Larkspur, 924-5111; larktheater.net.

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