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Project
Darkling
Adapted and Directed by Michael Comlish
Text: Darkling: A Poem by Anna Rabinowitz
Music by Stefan Weisman
"The Darkling Thrush" song by Lee Hoiby
About Darkling
American Opera Projects (AOP) explores the outer edges of the operatic form with DARKLING, an experimental opera-theatre work conceived and directed by Michael Comlish, with original music composed by Stefan Weisman and Lee Hoiby. Darkling was created for four singers (soprano / mezzo / tenor / baritone), seven actors, and string quartet with optional piano. A touring version of Darkling reduces the number of actors to three and is adaptable to multiple venues. (Click here for more info on the touring version of Darkling.)
Spanning the decades from the 1930’s to the post-World War period, DARKLING is a remarkable story – both poignant and humorous – of love, loss, calamity and hope. Past and present blur, characters are swept along by the great forces of history and lives are bowed and buffeted in this uniquely moving and captivating work. "Brave and sensitive" (The New York Times), DARKLING uses opera, avant-garde theatre, vaudeville and cutting edge technology to create “an unlikely collaboration of Wagner, Sally Bowles and Steven Spielberg" (Time Out/New York). Performed in English (Polish subtitles available), American Opera Projects’ dramatic tour-de-force views history not from a grand geo-political perspective but from the insightful, intimate outlook of a poet whose ordinary Polish-Jewish family is unexpectedly affected by extraordinary events of the Holocaust.
About the Creators
 Michael Comlish (director)
Michael Comlish, an AOP veteran since 1999, has led the development of Darkling at AOP in workshops over the last 2 years. His directing has been praised by the press as "high-style," "unorthodox," "wickedly uproarious," and "anti-Romantic," and was featured in the New Yorker’s "Talk of the Town" for his casting of pundit Andrew Sullivan as Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. Within the bleak world of Darkling he continues to explore a style that has been called "absurd, surreal, yet playful shifts among levels of reality." He created Nothing, from the notebooks of Richard Foreman, for the Ontological Blueprint Series. He is formerly from the Washington DC area, where he was a member of the Washington Shakespeare Company. There he directed an award winning production of Stoppard’s Travesties, The Real Inspector Hound, and co-directed A Streetcar Named Desire and subsequent revival to open WSC’s new home. Acting Roles at WSC included Edgar in Lear, Stanley in The Birthday Party, and Ken Talley in Fifth of July. For more information, visit www.comlish.com.
 Anna Rabinowitz (text: Darkling: A Poem )
Anna Rabinowitz was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for 2001. She won the Juniper Prize for her first volume of poetry, At the Site of Inside Out, which was published by the University of Massachusetts in 1997. Her work has appeared widely in such journals as Atlantic Monthly, Boston Review, The Paris Review, Colorado Review, Southwest Review, Denver Quarterly, Sulfur, LIT, VOLT, and Doubletake. Her work has also appeared in the anthologies, The Best American Poetry 1989, edited by Donald Hall, Life on the Line: Selections on Words and Healing, and in The KGB Bar Reader. She edits and publishes the nationally distributed literary journal, American Letters & Commentary, and is a vice-president of the Poetry Society of America. Her most recent book, The Wanton Sublime, appeared in March 2006. For more information, visit www.annarabinowitz.com.
 Stefan Weisman (composer for Darkling)
Stefan Weisman first worked with AOP as a member of its annual Composers & the Voice program. His music has been heard at places such as Symphony Space, the June in Buffalo festival, the Flea Theater, and Guggenheim Museum's "Works & Process" series. His compositions include chamber, orchestral and choral pieces, as well as music for theater, video and dance. Among his commissions are works for Sequitur, the Minimum Security Composers Collective, the Gay Gotham Choir, and the Oregon Bach Festival, which commissioned a piece in honor of George Crumb on the occasion of his 75th birthday. His orchestral work "The Bird Happens" was selected to be included in the American Composers Orchestra's 2005 Underwood New Music Readings, and was conducted by Steven Sloane. His piece “From Frankenstein” won the Chicago Ensemble’s 2005 Discover America Competition and was presented by male-soprano Anthony Costanzo with the ensemble Newspeak, conducted by James Lowe in Merkin Hall's "Ear Department: Emerging Composers" concert series, moderated by composer Michael Gordon. His piece "Skin Nails Hair" was performed in New York City by the Lost Dog New Musik Ensemble. Stefan participated in AOP’s Composers & the Voice during the 2003-04 season. For more information, visit his website.
 Lee Hoiby (song composer – “The Darkling Thrush”)
Lee Hoiby is beloved by performers as diverse as Leontyne Price and Jean Stapleton, for his numerous settings of texts from Emily Dickinson to Julia Child. Mr. Hoiby was introduced to opera by his teacher at the Curtis Institute of Music, Gian Carlo Menotti, who involved him closely in the famed Broadway productions of The Consul and The Saint of Bleecker Street in the early 1950s. His works have been recognized by awards and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1989 his work was the subject of a retrospective concert at the Kennedy Center on the American Composer Series, and a two-week festival of his work was presented by the music department of the University of California at Long Beach. His principal works include the operas The Scarf (1958 ), A Month in the Country (1964), Summer and Smoke (1971) and The Tempest (1986). He is also the composer of nearly 100 songs, as well as music for orchestra, solo instruments, chorus and the theater. He lives in upstate New York. For more information, visit www.leehoiby.com
AOP Presentations
June 11, 2007:
Touring concert version
Aleksander Fredro Theatre
Gniezno, Poland
June 9, 2007:
Premiere of touring concert version
Max Kade Auditorium, Freie Universität Berlin
Berlin, Germany
May 12, 2007:
Preview of touring concert version
and other new works presented by On the Edge
New York City Opera's VOX 2007
Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, New York University
June 06, 2006:
Concert reading of scenes. Post-show panel discussion with creators.
Co-production with Friends of Freie Universität Berlin as part of Jewish Documentary Film, Theater and Speaker Series, German Consulate General, Auditorium, NYC.
Feb. 26 - March 18, 2006:
WORLD PREMIERE
East 13th Street Theater
136 East 13th St.
New York, NY 10003
November 13 & 14, 2005:
Workshop concert reading of scenes w/ panel discussion
Works & Process at the Guggenheim series
Peter B. Lewis Theater, Guggenheim Museum, NYC.
April 19 & 20, 2005:
Workshop concert reading of scenes
The Great Room, 138 South Oxford Space, Brooklyn, NY
Music Direction: Steven Osgood
January-February, 2004:
Improvisational development workshops
Director Michael Comlish held performance workshops in Brooklyn and Manhattan to develop Darkling by exploring each section of the original poem. The following performers participated: Elzbieta Czyzewska, Rana Kaye, Peter Kazaras, Dylan McCullough, Carol Monda, and David Tirosh.
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