Virginia Woolf drowns, dolphin rescues Arion

Diane Lane is an important singing actress in Milwaukee, and young Susan Wiedmeyer will be important soon. Milwaukee Opera Theater present them Friday in a pair of intriguing, flawed, ambitious one-woman one-acts.

Lane sang Dominick Argento’s From the Diary of Virginia Woolf, a song cycle that won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize. Director (and MOT artistic director) Jill Anna Ponasik, Ben Krywosz and Tom Bartsch theatricalized it. Lane was not merely a singer, she was Woolf, in a fetching period dress and sensible shoes, with books in the background and papers on her worktable.

Lane sang frankly to the crowd as she pasted together papers (the purpose remains a mystery to me) and prowled the platform stage of the Sunset Playhouse Studio Theater. Lane, a strong presence and a superb actress, faced a vague sort of acting task that didn’t give her quite enough to do. Maybe the creative team took its cue from this diary entry: “Why not invent a new kind of play; as for instance: ‘Woman thinks. He does. Organ plays. She writes. She writes. They say: She sings. Night speaks. They miss. They miss.'”

Argento’s music is free-ranging Expressionism disciplined by 12-tone method. The melodies play out in unpredictable arioso based on speech rhythms — a good approach to Woolf’s elliptical, intimate prose.

It’s a tough sing, with tricky leaps, nearly constant dissonance and few doublings in the piano. I can’t know whether she missed any pitches. But her consistency and confidence and her way of stubbornly sustaining pitch no matter how the harmonies ripped against it suggest that she nailed it. A good deal of it is loud and high, and Lane showed great stamina and energy throughout.

I can’t say I enjoyed this piece, but admire it and I admire Lane for taking it on. (Do read the texts before the singing starts; it’s always hard to make out words when they emanate from a high female voice.)

The difficult piano part does not merely accompany. The piano sounds like the tumult of Depression, Fascism and War (1919-1941) outside the door of Woolf’s study. Jamie Johns played it intensely and with great command. Lane flinched in response to Johns’ sharpest piano blows, and that bit of drama worked.

As Lane left the room, projected text informed us that Woolf put heavy stones in her pockets, walked into a river and drowned at the age of 59. Which set the stage for Wiedmeyer’s disquisition on the bodily mechanics of drowning.

Krywosz, who co-created Meditations on Arion with Jennifer Baldwin Peden in 2005, directed Wiedmeyer. Like Lane, she faced a daunting acting task. Sometimes she’s the narrator, sometimes she’s Arion, the ancient musician who sang so charmingly that a dolphin saved him from drowning. Krywosz could have reined in Wiedmeyer; at times, she overacted in that earnest way of young performers, particularly in the opening bit. Why not deliver clinical language in a clinical way?

The music is a pastiche drawn from André Campra, Heitor Villa Lobos, Leonard Bernstein, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Amitav Ghosh and Meredith Monk. The program did not make clear who stitched it together, but it’s a patchwork quilt with bumpy seams. The arrangement, for piano, cello and clarinet, is awkward and not idiomatic for the instruments, and the playing sounded under-rehearsed.

And yet, the piece had a certain odd charm, like that of a dark fairy tales that goes off on dreamy tangents. The sweetness of Wiedmeyer’s singing, the sweetness of her person in such close proximity, and the easy, buoyant grace of her body in motion carried the day and kept the show afloat.

This young woman has something special. It’s not quite developed yet and thus hard to describe. But you can feel it.

The double bill runs at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday, April 1-3, at the Sunset Playhouse, 800 Elm Grove Road, in Elm Grove. Tickets are $20, $16 for seniors and $1o for students. Order at the Sunset box office,  262 782-4430, or click here.