By Daniel Buckwalter
It’s about the courage to yearn for light in the black clouds of oppression. It’s about the fact that not everyone succeeds in their yearning for light — the black clouds of oppression are too heavy — and for others, they offer sanctuary because they don’t know anything else.
Always, it’s about the ever-present and suffocating tyranny of those black clouds and the singular man who produces them in Dark Sisters, a chamber opera performed by Eugene Opera that had a two-performance run on May 30 and 31 at the Wildish Community Theater in Springfield, in front of appreciative audiences.
Composed by Nico Muhly with libretto by Stephen Karam and premiered in 2011, Dark Sisters was inspired by the 2008 raid on the Yearning for Zion Ranch by Texas Child Protective Services who claimed to have evidence of widespread child sexual abuse and forced marriages of underage girls, which prompted the removal of more than 400 children.
The Yearning for Zion Ranch was a branch of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints, settled by members of the FLDS Church who fled the media, anti-polygamy activists and law enforcement scrutiny of their lives in Arizona and Utah.
A flurry of lawsuits followed the raid, and, ultimately, the state of Texas was forced by the Texas Supreme Court to return the children to their parents, citing a lack of sufficient evidence of immediate danger.
The Yearning for Zion Ranch property was seized by the state of Texas in 2014, and it is no longer a functioning community or open to the public.
That aside, Muhly chose to focus Dark Sisters on six women — Eliza, Almera, Zina, Presendia, Ruth, and Eliza’s daughter Lucinda — and takes place just after the raid as they navigate the abuse and exploitation of the maniacal and evil Prophet-King (sung by baritone Zachary Lenox).
Two of the women in particular stand out. Eliza (the wonderfully talented soprano Jocelyn Claire Thomas) is the character yearning for light. She wants her daughter back, and she wants to escape. She makes that clear at the outset, and her voice gets stronger and stronger as the opera unfolds. Eliza can no longer stand to spend eternity with a man whose hand she’s afraid to touch.
Eliza makes it out and comes back for her daughter, the 18-year-old Lucinda (soprano Madeline Ross), but the daughter decides to remain in this dark and hellish ranch. It is what she knows.
The saddest character is Ruth (soprano Hannah Penn). It’s revealed in Act I that she lost two children in the distant past, one to a drowning and the other to cancer. The Prophet-King was hardly nurturing through those tragedies, and Ruth kept a stiff upper lip (“Perfect obedience produces perfect faith” and “Keeping sweet is a matter of life and death” are two frequently sung lines in this opera).
By Act II, however, after the raid and the angst, Ruth is crushed by the black clouds of oppression. They are too heavy. She takes off her dress and jumps off a cliff at the ranch.
Eugene Opera’s production of Dark Sisters was conducted by artistic director Andrew Bisantz, with stage direction by Nathan Troup.
Cast of Eugene Opera’s Dark Sisters: Jocelyn Claire Thomas, Hannah Penn, Sarah Beaty, Madeline Ross, Zachary Lenox, Emily Way, Erika Rauer
Creative Team: Nathan Troup, Andrew Bisantz
