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The director James Darrah sets the desolate tale amid unpainted wood and a stage-filling plot of soil. When “Proving Up” was presented at Opera Omaha in April, after having its premiere at Washington National Opera in January, the playing space was a catwalk, with the audience on either side, for an experience that must have been unsettlingly immersive.
Even at the Miller, a traditional proscenium theater, the opera insinuates itself under the skin. The story is set entirely in the past, but its depiction of the stubborn delusions that fueled American expansionism — and the ways in which “proving up” comes to mean both having a home and being a virile man — feels entirely current.
Least successful is the portrayal of the mysterious, malignant stranger, a kind of angel of death, who dominates the final chunk of the opera. A figure of infinite threat in Ms. Russell’s story — you’re reminded of Judge Holden from Mr. McCarthy’s novel “Blood Meridian” — he is, as played by Andrew Harris in the opera, a grumpily stentorian, all-too-real presence.
He makes less impact as an onstage character than he did as a quasi-fantastical force in prose. Opera is generally good at taking naturalistic, even workaday, subject matter and heightening it into stylization; this last part of “Proving Up” does the opposite — to, I think, its detriment. If the sequences with the Sodbuster, as the opera dubs him, retain spooky force, it’s largely because of Mr. Slattery’s Miles, whose fear is underplayed and feels very real.
But Ms. Mazzoli and Mr. Vavrek’s final tweak to Ms. Russell’s story, suggesting the initiation — or, perhaps, continuation — of a cycle of resentment and retributive violence, is a chilling touch. If anxieties about possession and manliness continue to fray our national life, “Proving Up” proposes that here our troubles began.
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