Director Elkhanah Pulitzer Aims for the Moon

When the opera Birds in the Moon is presented off-site by The Broad Stage in Santa Monica on Wednesday, it will be a performance long time in the making. The work, written by Mark Grey and Júlia Canosa i Serra and directed by Elkhanah Pulitzer, was meant to have its world at the Broad Stage in the fall of 2020, but then COVID got in the way.

This allegorical opera uses the work of 17th century scientist Charles Morton as the springboard for a story about a Bird-Mother and her Bird-daughter who encounter a traveling show featuring musicians and a ringmaster. Morton’s theory was that birds migrated to the moon every year. So migration and the environment were the on minds of all of the Birds in the Moon creators.

Last week I spoke via Zoom with Pulitzer. She is a highy-acclaimed director of opera and theater.

Amongst her projects have been productions of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass (with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and at Lincoln Center), the world premiere of composer David Lang’s Prisoner of the State with the New York Philharmonic and Esperanza Spalding’s 12 Little Spells Tour. And yes, she is part of the Pulitzer family.

We discussed the opera, whether allegorical works need to be fully understood by an audience and whether the arts can make a difference in people’s understanding of socio-political crises. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity.

I don’t know if this is a good or bad thing for this project, but it seems like between the radical change in weather in places like Greenland, where it rained for the first time in a location it only previously snowed, and the growing immigration crisis that’s magnified by what’s going on in Afghanistan and the inevitable backlash against refugees, it seems as though Birds in the Moon gets more topical by the day. Is that how you see it? 

I think yes is the short answer. And I feel like some of these issues have been going on for quite a while. And we just see them manifesting in all sorts of different headlines in the news. And I think that awareness is amplifying around issues related to both things and desertification and the move north to get to better farming and more fertile ground and a more hospitable place to be able to live and grow food. All that stuff is is very real. 

When you start looking at utopia and a quest for a better life, you immediately start looking at immigration, migration trends around people traveling and what motivates somebody to leave a generational homeland and seek refuge somewhere else. And it has to be generally pretty extreme. There has to be some sort of physical danger or crisis that’s precipitating it. Sometimes it’s a quest for knowledge and curiosity, but often times it’s much darker forces at work. So we were looking at what is a utopia. And also, if you’re questing to go to the moon, what does that really mean? Because if you did go to the moon as a human or an animal, you would die because there’s no oxygen. So it’s this twofold promise of utopia quest and then what happens when you really arrive and what concessions are made and what sort of life is is carved out when you get there.

You’re working with a piece here that is that is allegorical in nature. I’m wondering how important it is for you as a director to make that understood by the audience, or does it even need to be understood by the audience or even enjoyed? 

That’s a great question. Early on we decided, because we were going to be tackling some of these topics, we didn’t want to be soap-boxy. We wanted to kind of enter into a space that allowed for allegory and some sense of magic or something that’s almost like Aesop’s fables. The lesson is there, but can it be done in a way that’s a little bit more fantastical or whimsical or digestible so that it’s not just soapboxing in the park? We didn’t want to do that. So that’s kind of where the allegory emerged from during the development was to just kind of knock it off its center a little bit and to create room for magic and hope and transformation. Because that’s the stuff that we all need in order to survive and thrive as human beings, and it’s also probably the medicine, an antidote to some of the challenges that are that the piece raises.

There was a paper that was published in the last year or two that said that the more climate change becomes an issue, the more it will directly impact migration and immigration issues because people are going to be leaving these in inhospitable environments trying to find someplace easier to live.

What role do you think the arts can play in helping people become aware of truly how much of a crisis this is? And what role would you like to play as an artist in getting that message out? 

Why do art in the first place? This is kind of related to that. I mean, there’s always a political component to art, whether somebody wants to acknowledge it or not. And I was listening to [visual artist] Alfred Jafa do an interview online a while ago, and he said so succinctly, truth lies between how you and I look at the table. My view of the table is not your view of the table. Then you add to that who’s at the table or near the table to even look at it in the first place. And that really becomes sort of the the metaphor for all of this. And so I think that art can foster an understanding that my view of the table might be different than yours or that the truth lies somewhere in between. In that understanding, one hopes, is born a deeper appreciation and a deeper care. And if that is fostered, then presumably that extends outward to one’s environment and to relationships, not only with other human beings, but also to immediate surroundings and the choices that we make.

There are a lot of companies around the world that are celebrating Leonard Bernstein’s Mass on its 50th anniversary, a work that was reviled for the most part when it came out. But somehow, 50 years later, we can look at it and recognize exactly what he was doing. So with the number of new works that are being created and produced, how important do you think time will be will be in their ultimate embrace?

I always wonder about that. I mean, in terms of opera, why did certain pieces stick and become such a huge part of the repertoire and what lies dormant that we missed? That’s awesome. I guess from a musicologist point of view you would hope that the research and the due diligence to turn over and research all that material is there so that we presumably are carrying the cream of the best forward. It’s hard to say. Everyone is seeking lightning in a bottle; something that has longevity and also, I think, really good stuff that lasts past the sort of expiration date of what’s popular or immediately in the zeitgeist – like the things that last presumably tap into those deeper narratives about teaching us how to be better human beings and know what our capacity is and limits are.

The Birds in the Moon begins performances on September 1st and continues through September 4th. For event location and tickets go here.

Photo: Elkhanah Pulitzer (Photo by Kristen Loken/Courtesy Cadenza Artists)