Following up on La Femme Bohème…

I met Dana in grad school at BU and worked with her at the Boston University Tanglewood Institute back in 20010, and our schedules finally lined up for this show.

I’ve always wanted to do a Boheme of course, because it’s such a chestnut that has already been reinvented so many times, that it’s an exciting challenging to find a way to tell the story that is important and relevant enough to justify telling it again. The all-female part of it was all Dana’s idea.  I would have done the project either way, but this gave me another piece of the puzzle of how it would take shape.

I think in a lot of the standard (western European 18th and 19th century) repertoire, female characters are voiced with very little agency.  However, sometimes the plots leave enough space for interpretation that certain actions can be attributed to the female characters, even if that is not stated explicitly in the libretto.  It’s the “cracks” that interest me.  Whose idea was this, really?  Much more often than the words say, it’s the female character’s.  In Tabarro, did Luigi really go made with jealousy and kill Giorgetta’s abusive husband, leaving her destitute, or did Giorgetta need a way out so she found a man she would be able to convince to kill him?

Doing this opera with an all female cast asks audiences to examine the privileges they give to and excuses they make for certain behaviors when they are coming from someone male, and examine how different these seem words seem coming out of a woman’s mouth.  When Rodolfo first meets Mimi, she is proactive in getting to know him, but almost immediately he repeatedly pressures her to “stay in” because it’s “so cold outside” after having already tried and been turned down for a kiss. She convinces him to go out instead by promising that she’ll keep her body very close to his. He finally agrees and then asks “But what happens when we got back?”  This exchange is usually presented as rakish or charming when a male singer is doing it.   I think hearing a woman sing those words, without our built-in cultural schema of excuses for them, that behavior is exposed as disrespect for consent.