Trauma and hope
Story churns up HGO’s piece ‘After the Storm’ depicts human reactions to two hurricanes that devastated Galveston
David Hanlon hears music in a storm.
Unlike a sudden natural disaster, a hurricane stirs anticipation and anxiety before its arrival, followed by loud, lashing winds and heavy rain. A quiet spell ensues as the eye passes, and then more violent devastation. Once it has passed, silence again, as those who endure it take stock of what remains.
The tumult moves in swells and wanes like an orchestral showpiece.
So when Hanlon, a composer, saw a request for proposals for a Houston Grand Opera commission that would resonate with the community here, he responded with an idea about two storms that hit Galveston. Once his proposal was selected, he began developing a piece with librettist Stephanie Fleischmann. They worked with the title “After the Storm.”
“That was deliberate,” Hanlon says. “It speaks to the devastation but also the hope.”
They conceived a musical narrative with director Matthew Ozawa based around cycles, with the storm itself the central rotating event.
“After the Storm,” a chamber opera that makes its world premiere Friday at the Wortham Theater, touches on the Great Storm of 1900, which destroyed Galveston, as well as Hurricane Ike, which put the city under water in 2008.
The production, which also will be performed Sunday at the Grand 1894 Opera House in Galveston, looks to the future as well.
“It addresses characters under pressure,” Fleischmann says. “Then, more recently, but it also is about the future facing us: shifting climates, bigger storms and storms coming with greater frequency.”
Hanlon, Fleischmann and Ozawa put a tight focus on those who experienced the two storms.
They dug into the Galveston Historical Foundation and the city’s Rosenberg Library and read transcripts of interviews conducted in the 1970s with survivors of the 1900 storm. The old stories turned up wrenching details, such as nuns in an orphanage singing the old hymn “Queen of the Waves” and tying some of the children together by the wrist in hope of keeping them together, unaware that doing so ensured drowning.
They also interviewed many who lived on Galveston when Ike submerged the island. Hanlon — a former HGO Studio artist — was the only one of the three in the area at the time, and his wife, a former Chronicle reporter, was in Galveston reporting on the aftermath. They were moved by the hopeful story of a bagpiper playing “Amazing Grace” after the storm had passed.
From their research, they devised a crossgenerational story of Eliza Goodman, a Galveston native and lifelong resident, and her daughter Lucy, who has left the island for Houston. They have different concepts of and relationships to their home, which come to the fore as Ike approaches. Eliza’s ties to the island are deep, and she keeps letters from ancestors who endured the 1900 storm. Lucy’s connection is not the same.
With a narrative in place, the creative team had to come up with a way to tell the story, which presented challenges.
“Three time periods, three stories, what do you do?” Ozawa says. “How do you show flooding? Do you use water? Film?”
Their limitations proved to be an attribute.
“There’s no grand stage piece,” Hanlon says. “You can’t flood the stage, and we don’t have a full orchestra. A hurricane is so powerful, though, you’re bound to disappoint if you even try to re-create it in any way. But working with a storm, you can still create sounds and images that are more powerful than literal allusions.”
Ozawa adds, “You give the audience the opportunity to use their imagination based on what you put on stage.”
So the set piece is very simple: the perimeter of a house. In a rehearsal room, a rope surrounds it to represent rising waters.
Since they didn’t have to create a deluge, the three could instead work with the nuance of crisis, endurance and resilience.
Ozawa brings up “the stuff of lives” as a commonality between the two storms — what remains when most everything has been wiped out.
“It’s an interesting concept,” Hanlon says. “There were two sides of the same coin. We heard a lot of people say the same thing. ‘It’s just stuff.’ And the flip side of that is people who lost something very important to them: an heirloom or something like a valuable comic-book collection they’d spent years building. Things of great personal value. That was repeated to us, too.”
“After the Storm” is built on cycles: from the spinning storm itself to the lives destroyed and rebuilt.
Hanlon talks of its quietest moments. “There’s a lot of silence in this opera,” he says. “The anticipation, the eye of the storm, the aftermath.”
Fleischmann mentions the darkness that followed for days. “Nobody’s lights were on, and people just talked. People who didn’t know each other talking and helping each other out.”
The three are particularly excited that “After the Storm” will play in Galveston Opera House, which is a survivor of both storms. And though the opera has a particular connection to that venue, the creative team thinks its appeal should extend beyond the Gulf Coast.
“Galveston is still haunted by that storm,” Fleischmann says. “We very much designed this to reflect a local experience, but we also wanted it to reach beyond that. I think the themes speak to a much broader audience.”