Kaneza Schaal Takes a Trip Down Highway 1, USA

“I think that the stories we tell about ourselves and each other are the fabric of our existence. Literally build the architecture and social and political interaction.” That’s how director Kaneza Schaal (Omar) discusses the immense value of the arts.

Schaal is directing Highway 1, USA by William Grant Still for LA Opera. It is on a program of two one-act operas (the other being Zemlinsky’s The Dwarf). Opening night is Saturday, February 24th at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. It will be performed through March 17th.

The opera tells the story of Bob (Norman Garrett) and Mary (Nicole Heaston). They have gone to incredible lengths to support Bob’s brother Nate (Chaz’men Williams-Ali). They hope that once he has finished his education he will move on with his life. Though Mary dislikes Nate, Bob is honoring a commitment he made to his mother on her deathbed. Nate doesn’t move on and complications ensue.

It is with the Pulitzer Prize-winning opera Omar that many audiences became familiar with Shaal. Her direction of that opera, coupled with the music and libretto by Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels, catapulted the opera into the modern day repertoire.

Just before traveling to Los Angeles to commence rehearsals, I spoke with Schaal about Still’s opera and his optimistic view of the future; the question she’d most like to ask Still if given the chance and the importance of having stories from “people who have built worlds even when the world was against them.”

What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To see the full interview, please go to our YouTube channel.

Q: This work premiered in 1963, but remained relatively unperformed until Opera Theatre of Saint Louis did it in 2021. What do you think the two plus generations of opera goers who didn’t get a chance to see this opera missed out on?

I think we missed out on maintaining American lineage. I think this is an incredible work. Of course, Still’s symphonic works were celebrated. His operatic works weren’t as widely received. So I think we missed out not only on this piece, but on Still’s oeuvre, all of his operatic works. The idea that this was birthed in the 40s and then didn’t get its production until the 60s. So it really is, as you said, multiple generations who’ve lost this music. 

We probably don’t have to go too far out on a limb to speculate why, in 2021, an opera company decided to give new life to this opera. But I assume you can’t do it just because of socio-political issues. You have to do it because there’s something in it that warrants it as well. What do you think is at the core of this opera and the way William Grant Still tells this story that warrants continued interest in it?

I think like with so much of Still’s music, there’s really a sense that he is building a world. This music is him dreaming into existence the future. And quite frankly,the future of all of these works being in the world as well. He started writing it in a backdrop of war. That’s this moment. That’s the birth of American sitcom, which I very much think of as an American dreaming container – this home of our aspirational class stories.

The operatic canon also has lots of station in life tensions and class struggle as well. So I think these ideas sit well in this form. But I think touching this music now is an opportunity to also be in our own moment of a backdrop of war. Spending time with this music you can think about the kind of facade of the 50s, the kind of disjointedness of that world. What does it look like to hold the disjointedness of our world now? What are the ways that we resolve these fractures? I think this opera holds all of that.

It’s also a classic story about family dynamics. Particularly as it relates to Nate and his role in the story. The noise that surrounds family dynamics may change over decades, but the core of what family dynamics are really remain the same, don’t they?

One of the delights I have in this music is that I think there’s a dissonance between the words we receive on the page in the libretto and what we hear; the harmonic complexity of Nate’s music, the sweeping kind of mythological landscape that his music invokes. I think there’s a way to think about this character and think about all of these characters beyond a kind of moralism. The libretto, in some ways, is very straightforward. You could feel it like a morality play. You could feel it like a tight sitcom inside of a small apartment. But musically, there’s a complexity to all of the thought. I am very interested in what happens when we strip away the kind of moralistic lens and invite ourselves to really sit in the in the complexity of how we receive these characters in the music.

The opera runs an hour. There are two scenes in it. There’s not a lot of time for enormous exposition about backstory and the way the opera is constructed. Is a backstory important for you in approaching this particular story and the way you want to present it? 

In terms of backstory, I think that depends on the singers, and I cannot wait to be in the rehearsal room with them and to be building the frameworks that they need to hold the music and hold the story. But from my position, holding the stage, the frame for this investigation and this kind of moving beyond the moralism is Mary’s first music when she sings about the fox and the hair. Of course, she’s drawing on br’er rabbit and br’er fox, these African-American folklore kind of traditions of tricksters. These are stories that came across from Africa into America. So I’m very interested in that trickster lineage that this opera starts with. We actually do have a manifestation of the fox and hare on stage to keep reminding us of these other forces that are at play as we receive the story.

I read an interview that you did around the time of Omar where you talked about how great opera operates in many different languages and that it was your role to build a library through which a story will be told. What’s the library that Highway 1, USA requires from you?

So many. One of the conversations that I had early on with the production designer, Christopher Myers, was really thinking about this dark underbelly of these times that get presented so often in that plastic forward facing 50s container. So much was going on globally. We’ve been looking at various artists who think about disjointedness and rupture and wholeness in different ways. One of them is James Rosenquist and another is Alma Thomas. Very different ways of dealing with rupture and joint. But those are two artists who’ve been important to me in how do we explode this apartment and begin in the rupture and begin in the mythological landscape of these ideas.

I do not come to the opera for a kitchen sink with running water. I come for myth and violence and holiness and contradiction. So I wanted our stage to be able to hold and begin in that vastness and in the disjointed world before we find ourselves in the intimacy and in the healing and union of Mary and Bob.

William Grant Still did not put any specific mention of race into this work. In fact, Christian Mark Gibbs, who sang Nate at St. Louis, said Still wanted it to be done by various cultural groups. Do you share that opinion of Still’s intention for this work?

I hear him trying to dream this world. I think it’s a challenging dream. An un-raced fantasy is a challenging fantasy. It is as problematic as it is glorious. That is what I hear in the music. And I think he meant it. There’s lots of speculation. Was he saying that in order to protect the legacy of the work and pray that it would get produced, or was he saying it because he was dreaming this future? I would argue he was dreaming this future. This complex, magnificent and also a little problematic future of this un-raced possibility.

Do you feel like this is progress of performing works by Black composers, whether in the concert or the opera house, is going to be sustainable, or do you have fear that this is a response to a moment in time? 

I don’t know any way through this moment that is separated from the global processing of war that’s happening. That’s separated from the election year terror that we have nationally, or that’s separated from the immediate and existential crisis of a warming planet. I think through all of that we rely on our dreamers and the people who have built worlds when the world was against them. And who have left us these seeds and these scaffoldings. I think we need artists who are very skilled in that way. Often those are artists who’ve been excluded from the conversation.

Are there are there differences for you between lesser-known works and even world premieres that people have no awareness of whatsoever? 

Well we don’t get to hang out. It was nice to hang out with Michael and Rhiannon. As we got to work, there’s a richness to that. But I think in terms of the task as a director of holding all of the artists who hold this music and the, what shall we call it, the weight of the task, I think incomparable, but also of the same magnitude.

Since you could hang out with Rhiannon and Michael, if you could hang out with William Grant still, what would you most want to ask him about this opera? 

I would want to talk to him about the dream. I would want to talk to him about that fantasy that he is writing into that music of where we could all head. And I did do one thing he asked me not to do, which was put the gas station on stage. But I have done that because we need the mythological landscape of these ideas, and because I believe in my heart of hearts that he put that there because he didn’t want misery porn. He wanted the dignity and the beauty and the tenderness and the care and the exquisite attention to home craft in that apartment. So I would also just want to run that by him and give him my pitch for why it was important.

I read a conversation that you did with Alicia Hall Moran and two others with Kimberly Drew. You said in that conversation, “I am looking for an opera that tells glorious and horrific stories with grace, violence and beauty.” Moving forward, what are the stories you think that need to be told now and in the near future, whether they’re set in present day or not? 

So many things. I am interested in how we’re all processing war right now. I’ve been in the early phases of working on a piece that takes a text from Ocean Vuong, the mighty poet who thinks so beautifully about processing war. I’m curious about the parade of women, the kind of orgy of women dying of consumption in the canon and the hysteria of it all. So I’ve got some irons in the fire there. And then most of all, I’m always interested in the stories that talk about what happens in the in-between spaces, in the shadows we all cast on one another. I think the opera is the best place for asking all those questions. 

I’m hoping somebody does an opera about Flint, MI. That has everything in it. The fact that it’s still being neglected at this point…that is not the country I grew up in. It just continues, doesn’t it?

For the kind of violence and horror of of everyday life, the form has to be this big. It actually has to be this big. 

To watch the full interview with Kaneza Schaal, please go here.

Main Photo: Kaneza Schaal (Courtesy LA Opera)