A New Lease on Life for the WNO

Initially the Washington National Opera’s decision in January to part ways with The Kennedy Center, its home since 1971, left Francesca Zambello, the company’s artistic director, uneasy. “I was very concerned knowing what it's like to be homeless,” she tells NPR.

But three months later, her perspective has shifted. “I think we're now part of a bigger picture… part of a bigger community. I'm changing the nature of home and I'm making it about geographic diversity.” Scott Joplin’s  Treemonisha, the company’s first production after leaving its base on the Potomac, was at the Lisner Auditorium on the George Washington University campus, venue for the WNO’s first-ever performance in 1957.

The next production, The Crucible, Robert Ward’s 1961 opera based on Arthur Miller's 1953 play about injustice and mass hysteria, seems especially timely. “I think that everyone in this country, whatever side of the fence you're on, is certainly wondering what is happening with our legal system,” observes Zambello. “Is the Constitution still serving us today, is it serving us right now?”

These questions became particularly acute after the events of February, when Trump pulled what Zambello calls a “coup d’etat,” taking control of the Kennedy Center board and quickly firing many of the professional staff. “The building felt politicized,” she continues. “Everything was about us or them, about the two parties, whereas we have always been an apolitical building, an apolitical arts institution…. It should be about a good civil society,” she insists.

The feeling of unease was not limited to Zambello and her staff. J'Nai Bridges, the mezzo-soprano who portrays Elizabeth Proctor, falsely accused of being a witch, wrestled with singing at Trump’s Kennedy Center. “I was a bit hesitant,” she tells an interviewer, “because it's a tricky thing to navigate.” But performing the role came to feel like a “protest,” so she decided, “As uncomfortable as this might feel, I'm ready for it. But then things changed. And I have to say that I am relieved.”

Zambello says that WNO’s departure from The Kennedy Center represents “a new kind of creative freedom… producing in different venues that really are appropriate for the works that we will be presenting.” That freedom is essential as the arts come under increasing attacks from an administration and its supporters who believe the arts are unnecessary. “If all of us as artists and as people working in arts organizations do not stand up to the injustices that are around us,” she concludes, “then we are not doing our jobs.”

PBS

Pictured: Francesca Zambello