Homelessness in Houston takes center stage in HGO’s ‘Another City’
Houston Grand Opera’s next world premiere will look and feel differently from the 73 that preceded it. “Another City” focuses on a community in plain sight, yet unseen by many: Houston’s homeless population.
Composer Jeremy Howard Beck and librettist Stephanie Fleischmann’s opera, which premieres Thursday at Ecclesia Houston’s downtown campus, takes a 360-degree approach to the subject: some of its characters live on the street; others minister to them. One, known as The Navigator, falls somewhere in between. Distilling such a vast topic, and about 60 hours of interviews, into a cohesive dramatic work was about as difficult as it sounds, the creators admit.
“What Jeremy and I both did is we listened to and pored through those transcripts, and we kind of compared notes on which characters, which voices, were we most drawn to; but also which ones, if we were to choose out of all the people we met, embodied the different aspects of the situation most fully,” Fleischmann says. “And then we set about figuring out how they could share space in an opera.”
Beck and Fleischmann, who previously collaborated on “The Long Walk,” American Lyric Theater’s 2015 adaptation of Iraq War veteran Brian Castner’s memoir, took two 10-day research trips to Houston. During the first, they got what Fleischmann calls the “30,000-foot view” from policymakers, listening to what works and what doesn’t. The second trip was to the front lines, where they heard of innumerable ways people become homeless. Stories of addiction, eviction and incarceration were commonplace. One official from the mayor’s office told them, “The spigot of homelessness is always on,” relays Beck.
And yet, “We also encountered hope everywhere, oddly enough,” adds Fleischmann.
“What we kept hearing over and over again was this incredible resilience and strength of people (determined) to get through it themselves, to help each other through it, to help each other recover,” Beck says. “We were very moved by that.”
“Another City” is part of HGO’s long-running Song of Houston initiative, and Fleischmann wrote local homeless-services nonprofits such as the Beacon, Live Oak Friends meeting house and SEARCH directly into her libretto. The opera unfolds in one roughly 75-minute bloc of time as day turns into night, loosely knitting three narrative threads into a larger story: a young man has just spent his first night on the streets after sleeping in shelters for months; The Navigator searches for a veteran reluctant to move into permanent housing; and a teenage volunteer befriends an older woman named Ms. Violet, who runs the Beacon’s laundry.
Rather than use the episodic structure of many operas — recitative, aria, chorus and so forth — Beck wanted “Another City” to feel more symphonic, with different characters represented by musical motifs. One is consistently accompanied by finger-picked guitar.
Another is steeped in Motown and doo-wop; still another gets a “super-classical” tenor aria.
Beck’s score “really gives you the feeling of moving through a city,” Fleischmann says. “Like what happens when you walk down the street and you almost bump into someone who’s homeless and then keep walking, for instance. It’s that sense of motion and geography that the symphonic structure allows for.”
Staging the production at HGO’s usual home, the Wortham Center, felt somehow off. Instead, the company reached out to Ecclesia, the nondenominational church that bills itself as “Houston’s holistic Christian missional community.” In its meeting space hard by Interstate 45, the audience surrounds the stage on three sides.
“(The opera) needs to be in a place that feels accessible, that doesn’t feel imposing in any way,” Fleischmann says. “The architecture of the Wortham is a little bit that way, and the performers are performing in and around the audience as well as onstage — that sense of togetherness is really important for the piece.”
Many major American cities’ homeless populations have increased dramatically in the past decade, but Houston’s has gone the opposite direction. Due to policies that prioritize securing housing for homeless individuals as quickly as possible (known as “housing first”), the website Smart Cities Dive reported late last year that homelessness has dropped 63 percent since 2011. Last month, the city opened a new navigation center — which shelters and provides services to the homeless as they await permanent housing — and consequently closed one of its largest tent-city encampments, which had been located near Minute Maid Park.
But while things are trending in the right direction, the spigot is still open. The creators of “Another City” hope its unorthodox subject matter, unorthodox structure and unorthodox location will prompt audiences to reflect a little deeper on an issue that is all too easy to ignore.
“I sort of bristle a little bit at the idea that the purpose of art is to change people’s minds, but music and theater get past people’s defenses,” says Beck. “And whether that changes the world or not, I don’t know, but I think we all want to live in a world where we see each other more; and where there’s less aloneness and more togetherness.”