A Director’s Vision

Cues: What do you think connects all three operas in Il trittico, and did you attempt to work some kind of throughline into your staging?

JR: I don’t think we tried to bind the productions together in any way. But there are these themes of children and death that run through all three. In Il tabarro, we know that the death of a child caused a rift between Giorgetta and Michele. And then, of course, in Suor Angelica, we have another child who died. Finally, in Gianni Schicchi, there’s this notion of how far somebody would go for their children. But death is sort of a comic thing in Gianni Schicchi.

Cues: Can you tell us about your concept for Il tabarro?

JR: Il tabarro means “The Cloak.” There’s always something that’s covered—not just at the end when Michele covers up the corpse of Luigi. There are a lot of secrets. Everything is enshrouded with this darkness and mystery. People don’t talk about the present so much as they talk about the future and the past. They talk about life beyond this barge, but everything is cloaked in a working-class misery. It’s more about what we hear than what we see. When you hear the sounds of Paris—a song seller, a pair of lovers—you know there’s life beyond this miserable barge.

So we wanted to keep it claustrophobic. There are parts of Paris where barges are docked under bridges, and not in the most beautiful parts of the city. That was one of the reasons why we went with this kind of rusted-out hull for the show. 

The other thing that I find so ingenious about Il tabarro is the fact that you always feel like you’re adrift. You’re not on firm ground. There’s something about the pulse of the piece that’s very impressionistic. At times, you don’t always have a strong downbeat. Everything feels unmoored. It shouldn’t come off as a fun European river cruise.

Cues: Of the three operas, Suor Angelica is the most radically reimagined staging in your production. What inspired you to move the action from a 17th-century convent to a 20th-century hospital?

JR: One thing that was important was to figure out what kind of nuns they are—what they do, what their function is. I was looking at some photographs of different orders of nuns in Italy in the 20th century, and there was one image that struck me. It was a hospital, and the nuns were taking care of children who were orphaned after World War II. And we thought that there was something beautiful about that. So we set Suor Angelica in a post-WWII children’s hospital. For Angelica herself, what torture it must be to bear this secret about her own son and then to have to work with children.

This order definitely prays to the Blessed Virgin, and that’s important. The environment is all blue. It’s a little washed out, but it’s a classic color that you see in a lot of 16th- and 17-century paintings to represent the Virgin Mary. I think there are certain similarities between Mary and Angelica, both bearing a child who dies. In the day room of this facility where the kids are fed, there’s a shrine. When Angelica decides to kill herself, she covers up the statue because she can’t do what she’s going to do under the gaze of Mary.

At the end, there’s one little boy who drifts down the hall and puts his hand up against the glass door. That’s the image that Angelica is left with when she dies. So the question is, does she interpret that as salvation? Does that boy represent the child who died? Jesus? It’s not important to answer it. It’s more the fact that a kid is peering into this room where there is this strange combination of agony and ecstasy.

Cues: While your Gianni Schicchi is still set in Florence, you’ve updated the action from the 1290s of Dante’s day to the 1960s of filmmaker Federico Fellini. Why?

JR: Anytime I look at a piece I think, “How does it benefit by being updated?” There was just something about bringing Gianni Schicchi into the early ’60s of Fellini that made it a little more recognizable. Because this type of behavior still exists in many cultures: this type of family dynamic and greed and not marrying into the right family. The Donatis only care about the way they look—they’re very stylish. And then you have Gianni Schicchi, who’s like the town fixer. If he were a lawyer, he’d have a billboard for getting people out of jail. These are wonderfully despicable characters, but they’re also wonderfully lovable because of their eccentricities.

The environment that we chose is this sort of op-art, black-and-white, Italian-marble pattern. And Buoso’s room has the best view in Florence since he’s got that much money. It’s an impossible view because no building actually looks down at the Duomo from that angle. There’s also the hospital equipment—it’s like Buoso has refused to die. But he finally does in this production, with a little help…