Ricky Ian Gordon is a busy man. The New York-based 57-year-old out composer is finishing multiple opera commissions simultaneously for companies ranging from Houston Grand Opera to Opera Theatre of St. Louis.
Yet Gordon still made it a point to visit the Windy City during the weekend of Nov. 1 for the Chicago Opera Theater debut of his chamber opera Orpheus and Euridice. What makes Chicago Opera Theater's staging so unusual is that general director Andreas Mitisek ( who originally staged and designed the work in 2008 for Long Beach Opera in California ) presents it in a swimming pool.
Chicago Opera Theater was able to collaborate with the Chicago Park District to present Gordon's Orpheus and Euridice in the mid-century-modern Eckhart Park Pool. It fits with Mitisek's mission to stage opera in unconventional places, which is something he's done time and time again with Long Beach Opera, where he is also artistic and general director.
"Chicago is so lucky to have Andreas, because he's like a persistent ox," said Gordon, remembering the difficult logistics of rehearsing and staging the opera in a pool that was also open to the public. "He sees it in his head and he's going to go for it. And he knows full well that people are going to question him, and then it ends up being stunning."
Gordon was amazed at the elemental aspects of Mitisek's production, in which the water came to symbolize the mythological River Styx. Yet the small-scale nature of the work, which was originally written in as a project for clarinetist Todd Palmer and soprano Elizabeth Futral, has meant that Orpheus and Euridice can be staged most anywhere—from a Doug Varone-choreographed production at Lincoln Center in New York to Opera Theater of Pittsburg's 2011 staging at Allegheny Cemetery in Lawrenceville, Pa.
Yet the emotional reasons why Gordon wrote Orpheus and Euridice had to do with his grief at slowly losing his longtime partner, Jeffrey Grossi, to HIV and AIDS in the late 1990s.
"It exploded out of me and that's the only way to explain it. My subconscious needed to work something out and that story came to me one night at 4 a.m.," said Gordon about the ancient Greek myth of a mourning musician who journeys to the underworld in an attempt to reclaim his deceased wife. "I needed to tell that story, and that myth at that moment was the only way to tell it."
Yet Gordon said many of his other works in the past 10 years have also been a way for him to work through his grief.
"When Jeffrey kept getting sicker and sicker and ultimately died, the feeling was that I couldn't protect him and it shattered me," said Gordon, who also mentioned that he experienced horrendous bullying and sexual abuse while growing up in Long Island. "I was destroyed and I had to put myself back together. And the way for me to put myself back together was by writing."
Gordon specifically cited his 2007 song-cycle Green Sneakers for Baritone, String Quartet, Empty Chair and Piano, which is specifically tied to memories of Grossi, to his grand opera adaptation of John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath, which premiered at Minnesota Opera in 2007 and was staged locally earlier this year at Northwestern University.
"Believe it or not, The Grapes of Wrath was a really easy container for me at that time because the novel is riddled with grief," Gordon said. "It's just one loss after another."
Back in the 1990s, Gordon was initially seen as one of many potential successors to theater composer Stephen Sondheim. Several of Gordon's songs were featured on Audra McDonald's best-selling solo debut CD Way Back to Paradise, which also had recent or new material other theater composers like Jason Robert Brown ( Parade, 13 ) and Michael John LaChiusa ( Marie Christine, The Wild Party ).
Although Gordon did write two the off-Broadway musicals Dream True: My Life with Vernon Dixon ( 1999 ) and the Marcel Proust-inspired My Life with Albertine ( 2003 ), he's been finding more success with opera commissions both large and small.
Next year, Gordon and librettist Royce Vavrek are set to debut Twenty-Seven, a piece about the lives of lesbian poet Gertrude Stein and her partner, Alice B. Toklas ( respectively starring mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe and soprano Elizabeth Futral ) for Opera Theatre of St. Louis. There's also a gospel-hybrid collaboration with director/playwright Leonard Foglia next year called A Coffin in Egypt featuring mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade for Houston Grand Opera and Opera Philadelphia. And in the future, there's a potential Metropolitan Opera adaptation of Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage's 2004 drama Intimate Apparel.
"It's a good time. I feel like a lot of these projects are things I've generated or thought carefully about in terms of whether I could say something through them," Gordon said. "I get to work on a lot of things that I'm excited about with people who are fantastic."
And though Gordon is more than willing to revisit productions of his past works, he adds that it's time to move on from exclusively doing works inspired by his loss.
"Maybe it's metaphorical that here I am about to tell the story of Gertrude Stein, Meredith Bledsoe in A Coffin in Egypt and Esther in Intimate Apparel," said Gordon. "Having completely absorbed what happened to me, it's in the notes and everything I do, but it's for new stories now."
Ricky Ian Gordon's Orpheus and Euridice has two more performances at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Sunday, Nov. 8 and 11, at the Chicago Park District's Eckhart Park Pool, 1330 W. Chicago Ave. Tickets are free to the public, but very limited. Walk-up tickets are available at 6 p.m. prior to each performance on a first-come, first-serve basis. Visit www.chicagooperatheater.org for more information.
