By CAROLYN BROWN
Staff Writer
If you could exist inside any memory from your past as it happened around you, would you?
Emma West, as Miranda, and David Thomas Mather, as Octavian, rehearse “The Onion.” / COURTESY ERIC SAWYER
The new opera “The Onion,” about an eponymous AI device that can bring back memories in an immersive way, will premiere at Amherst College’s Holden Experimental Theater on Thursday, Sept. 11, through Saturday, Sept. 13, at 7:30 p.m. (The show will also run in Boston a few weeks later.)
The show is about a scientist, Magistra, who lives on an island with her daughter, Miranda, with whom she has a difficult relationship, and her assistant, Octavian. The Onion “lives” there, too – it’s a humanoid entity, and it gets more and more human as the show continues.
The opera’s co-librettists, composer Eric Sawyer and director Ron Bashford, wrote the piece during the pandemic, even before the rise of ChatGPT.
“A lot of time in the same place makes one’s memory wander,” Sawyer said, “and that’s what made me think that a piece about memory would be interesting.”
They had the idea to incorporate elements of time travel as well: “There’s no real mechanism to explain how that would work, but we all travel through memories to some extent, and the idea of an AI that could [make that happen] is actually not at all far-fetched,” he said.
“The combination of the confines of COVID and the idea that perhaps this was a piece of science fiction that wasn’t so fictional made it seem like an exciting thing to pursue,” Sawyer added.
A key theme of “The Onion” is about how recovering memories with the help of AI can both heal and harm. Years ago, Miranda’s father Cal, also a scientist, walked out on his family, stealing Magistra’s work in the process, and causing lasting ripple effects. Early in the show, Miranda sits through a memory of playing and singing with Cal when she was a little girl. To her, it’s a sweet recollection – only because she was too young at the time to realize that her father was using the game to distract her while he rifled through Magistra’s desk in search of her notebooks of data to steal. As Magistra confronts him about the theft inside the memory, Cal leaves, to his daughter’s distress in both the past and the present.
From left, Dana Lynne Varga, as Magistra, Emma West, as Miranda, and David Thomas Mather, as Octavian, rehearse “The Onion.” / COURTESY ERIC SAWYER
After the memory concludes, Magistra (in the present) comments that Cal was “full of promises, and full of lies,” and she tells her daughter, “You are my witness.”
Miranda, however, responds, “I don’t want to be your witness.”
“You saw what you saw!” Magistra replies. “You don’t get to choose.”
“I saw that he loves me,” Miranda says. “I won’t say a word against him. Why did you make him go?”
Later in the show, a character (no spoilers) uses the Onion to conjure a space in which they can live authentically within their gender identity: “Give knowledge of the past and future,” they sing, “so you can write the story.”
This show, naturally, has a modern setting – when’s the last time you saw a computer on an opera stage? – and is entirely in English, with supertitles. Sawyer (whose other works include the English-language historical operas “The Scarlet Professor,” about the arrest of a closeted Smith College professor, and “The Garden of Martyrs,” about two Irish Catholic immigrants falsely accused of murder) wanted to make the production accessible to audiences.
Besides that, a key component of the story is about a family drama and about what happens when someone interacts with their younger self, which can be emotionally intense. Sawyer pointed out that opera and operatic voices are unamplified, “but, in order to get the projection, they have this intensity to them. A subject with a certain amount of emotional intensity and a certain amount of passion is a good vehicle for opera.”
“This has its frightening moments, but I think it’s a kind of a balance of comic and dramatic, and, to some extent, unnerving, as anything with an AI talking to you and investigating your memories would be likely to be,” he added. “But the ability of people who are in different states of mind to talk to each other and sometimes to talk at the same time, as happens in operatic ensembles – all of these play to opera’s strengths.”
Inspirations for the “The Onion” included the movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” about two exes who undergo surgery to forget each other; the show “Black Mirror,” about the (often scary or ethically complicated) intersections of technology and modern society; the opera “Der Rosenkavalier,” which also has a character named Octavian; and the German television serial “World on a Wire,” about a simulated world created by a supercomputer. Shakespeare fans may also recognize connections to “The Tempest” – it, too, is set on an island, features a character named Miranda, and involves a servant with mysterious powers.
At the end of “The Tempest,” the servant spirit Ariel addresses the audience with a soliloquy about how he’s lost his powers; at the end of this show, the Onion itself, now a self-actualized character, warns the audience to beware of his.
David Small, as Cal, and Emma West, as Miranda, rehearse the opera “The Onion,” about an AI device that can bring memories to life. / COURTESY ERIC SAWYER
“We’ve had computers and the internet for a long, long time, and we’re used to the idea that these machines only do what we tell them we want them to do,” Bashford, the director, said. “But the question of AI that’s looming over all of us is, ‘What happens when the machine starts acting on its own and does things that it wants to do?’”
“We’re not trying to answer the question of what’s going to happen with AI,” he continued. “But I think we’re posing the question and just putting out the possibility that, in some ways, we’re all going to have no choice about how AI affects us.”
Tickets are $23.18 general admission or $17.85 for students. For more information or to purchase tickets, visit onionopera.com. The cast includes Dana Lynne Varga as Magistra, Emma West as Miranda, David Thomas Mather as Octavian, David Small as Cal, and Ifeanyi Epum as the Onion.
Carolyn Brown can be reached at cbrown@gazettenet.com.
