Call of the Roman Empire

Until now, you may have never read the words “young,” “sexy” and “opera” in one sentence. But get ready, because Houston Grand Opera’s new production of Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia seems to warrant the rare combination.

Both the opera and theater worlds are buzzing over the production, which features a relatively young cast and crew with many in their early 30s. The creative team includes Scottish conductor Rory Macdonald, 31; internationally famous South African baritone Jacques Imbrailo, 32, as the male lead; recent HGO Studio alums Ryan McKinny and Joshua Hopkins in key supporting roles; current studio member Lauren Snouffer in her first season performing with HGO; and, perhaps buzziest of all, New York-based director Arin Arbus, 31, making her opera debut.

Former HGO honcho Anthony Freud recruited Arbus himself, having seen the young director’s work with New York City’s Theater for a New Audience, where Arbus directed acclaimed productions of Shakespeare’s Othello and Measure for Measure. Charles Isherwood of The New York Times called Arbus, whose father Allan Arbus had a recurring role on M*A*S*H, “a star in the making.”

The director is known for what she calls “an aesthetic of essentialism,” treating each text she tackles as a piece of historical evidence or a new language to decipher. Her stagings of Shakespeare have been lauded for their striking intimacy and wholly developed, complex characters; not the dime-a-dozen, concept settings that plague most contemporary Shakespeare productions.

It’s an approach she honed while leading a theater company of inmates at, of all places, Woodbourne Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison in upstate New York, where she was afforded no budget for sets, props or lights. “I’m not going to be able to articulate this in a satisfying way,” says Arbus, “but there’s something about the [prisoners] themselves and their experiences, which are quite extraordinary. Somehow, they have helped me understand these great pieces of literature, like Shakespeare or Lucretia.”

Britten’s 66-year-old chamber opera is perhaps the perfect debut opera for Arbus. “The piece itself is kind of essentialized. It’s not a piece that calls for spectacle. It wants to be intimate,” she says. “It was first performed in 1946, and I strongly think the piece was written while Britten was grappling with the effects of WWII on England.

“Creating a chamber piece at that moment in history probably felt right,” she adds. “It was a moment in history where you didn’t want extravagance and you didn’t want spectacle—where you wanted to create something that was different and that connected to people in a more immediate way.”

The story is the same ancient tale that inspired Shakespeare’s poem of the same title. When Roman soldiers hear that their wives have been unfaithful during their absence, one soldier, the prince Tarquinius, portrayed at HGO by Imbrailo, rides to Rome to prove that Lucretia, wife of the fellow soldier Collatinus, has remained chaste. Tarquinius rapes her. Lucretia, devastated, stabs herself. Her death sparks a Roman uprising.

Veteran costume designer Anita Yavich has created garments that blend 1940s fashion with ancient Roman motifs, underlining Britten’s modern re-imagining of Lucretia. (Word is that patrons have already made bids to buy the costumes once the production closes.) And Jean-Guy Lecut’s spare and withering set design is inspired by Roman ruins, suggesting the toll of both literal and emotional warfare.

At a rehearsal last month, Arbus worked a scene involving Lucretia, to be portrayed by Metropolitan Opera regular Michelle DeYoung, her nurse and young maid. It’s the scene just before Tarquinius’ foreboding knock at the door. Arbus looked for every opportunity to emphasize the scene’s domestic routine, resisting contrived choreography and mining for real moments. “Because it’s a chamber piece,” she explains, “and because I think the characters are so complicated and human. I feel like part of what I’m interested in exploring with the singers is how to make that come to life and how to make the characters three-dimensional.”

Arbus was already a fan of Britten’s score. “I’m knocked out by the music, and I’m interested in the structure of the piece, which is unusual and challenging, I think—challenging for an audience,” she says. “I’m interested in Lucretia, a woman who refuses to accept things as they are and changes her world as a result of that. I find all of the characters to be archetypes, and at the same time they’re these psychologically complex beings, and that contradiction is really interesting to me.

“You judge them,” she adds, “and they’re exactly what you judge them to be, and yet they’re so much more complicated than that.”

What Arbus doesn’t find complicated is making the switch from directing theater to directing opera. “In pieces of great literature and great drama and great opera,” she says, “the creators are creating a world with very specific values, and the actors and the performers need to understand those values and believe in those values. And when it works, the audience is connected in a very intimate way to what is happening on stage.”

Arbus’ poise and focus in rehearsal is impressive, given her youth and inexperience directing opera. “I feel like I found my voice with the group that I work with in Woodbourne,” she says. “Going into the prison for the first time made me nervous, which is not unlike the situation I’m in now, entering into a new world at Houston Grand Opera. It helped me develop a little courage to be able to go to new places and work with new people, which is really exciting to me.”