From 2021's Elizabeth Cree to the upcoming Legend of the Ring, director Sam Helfrich's WEO experience is key to his return, "I really wanted to come back."
Many of our readers will remember your thrilling production of Elizabeth Cree - a smashing success in our 2021 festival. What was it about that show that hooked you in? As a staging director how did you approach Elizabeth Cee?
SH: I think what hooked me in was just the story, the drama. From the first time I looked at it, it was such a funstory.
I remember looking at it many times early on and not being entirely sure what was happening, so a guiding force in the making of the production was the thought: I can leave the audience feeling a sense of mystery, but they can't leave in a state of total confusion thinking, what the just happened? They need some hooks. They need some guidance.
There was a game in my mind of giving the audience just enough information and withholding information, which is all a part of directing anyway.
We don't get a lot of operas that are that kind of gothic horror genre. We have operas that people associate with gothic horror like Lucia and pieces like that, but this was really a mystery.
And it had cross-dressing, and disguises, and a ventriloquist’s dummy, and constant costume changes, and this crazy variety show that I rehearsed within an inch of its life – so many elements that were daunting at first, but the daunting part is also what makes you want to do it.
You also made that outdoor Bruns Amphitheater stage work for you. That's not easy to be outdoors in the elements and in the festival format where your set has a very limited amount of time to be put up and taken down.
Yes, we designed a set that was unique for that stage. A very important aspect of my career and my work, and why I love teaching in the Design Department at NYU, is that I surround myself with very good designers. So, figuring out the outdoors for that show was crucial for me. We wanted to make a statement, but also it was a piece that moves cinematically, with so many transitions. It had to just be a space that could be 15, 20 different things.
2021's Elizabeth Cree at The Bruns, Helfrich's West Edge debut. Photo: Cory Weaver
Does anything about Elizabeth Cree still linger with you now?
I'll never forget it because it was my first show back from the pandemic.
I got so lucky with the cast and the company. There was no drama. Everyone was completely lovely. Everyone wanted to be there every day and show up. And we had so much fun rehearsing that show.
It's a very, very vivid memory for me - a definitive production for me. If I did it again, I'd want to do something similar. But obviously if I was working indoors in a proscenium theater, I would approach it differently - not dramaturgically, but visually. I mean, the lighting thing was so weird because we had great stage lighting, but the show opened in a matinee outdoors! I never thought that show would work in complete sunlight, but it kind of did anyway.
So now to Wagner’s Legend of the Ring - an opera that’s simultaneously a household name and one that so many people have never seen - When Mark asked you about directing it for this 2024 season…what was your initial reaction?
I didn't really think much about it. I just said yes!
Mainly because I really wanted to come back. At this point in my career, because I've been doing this for 25 years, there is something very rewarding about coming back to companies where you had a good experience. I've worked in Pittsburgh nine times! I just did Flying Dutchman there last fall, and that's my ninth show there. I'll always come back there, no matter what they ask me to do. If they ask me to direct the phone book, I'll do it.
So when Mark asked me, the company is what I first thought about. And I couldn’t wait to come back.
My very early experience - the very first full-length opera I ever directed - was Die Walküre, but I’d never seen a production of the entire Ring. I've seen it in pieces, and I've kind of danced around it for many years.
So when I started thinking about Legend of the Ring…
I want every story to be contemporary. Opera's only interesting to me if it's resonant - and Legend of the Ringis a wild, fantastical opera, with lots of fantasy elements. There's a level on which you could do this opera and it would be like watching Dungeons and Dragons or something, but for me that would be kind of empty.
I want it to be about real people. Right around the time Mark asked me, someone strong-armed me into watching the television show ‘Succession’ and I found a lot of resonance there with the world of The Ring. So I started to see the Ring as being about a powerful guy who just wants to build a home for his family, and instead of building a home for his family, he destroys his family.
It's really important for Wotan to be present at the end of the opera, even though it's not written that way. I want him to be there watching the consequences of his actions unfold… In many ways, he's a victim of his own bad choices.
Because what is so great about this story is that they're gods, but they're not heroic at all. They're all total screwups. Wotan is a liar from the very first page of the opera. And because he's a bully, he basically beats Alberich over the head and steals his gold. He's not a good person…And yet there’s a scene, in the full version actually a 40-minute-long scene, between Wotan and Brünnhilde where he basically says everything he feels about his daughter and about his family - really wanting to take care of his daughter, take care of his children.
And then there’s the character of Fricka, who's a long-suffering wife, who I have a lot of empathy for.
If I can ask about this adaptation, David Seaman’s distillation… You know, the way that we relate to characters onstage has a lot to do with time – how much time we spend with them.
So, when you've taken an opera that's more than five times reduced from its normal length, moving from event to event with so little time in between, how do you see ‘time’ and ‘event’ through David Seaman's arrangement?
Well, one thing that was important to me was to have windows on the set because I really want Wotan and Fricka to watch a lot of the action. I want them present often even though they're not present in the script. I see them as very similar to Zeus and Juno.
They're an unhappy couple - she's this long-suffering wife who's just tired of being cheated on. Tired of her husband's philandering. That just feels so real to me. Even when the violence is extreme, even when she says: ‘You have to kill that kid and I'm not standing for anything less because he's gross, sleeping with his sister. He's foul. Get rid of him.’ I still have a lot of sympathy for her, and I want to keep her present. She has some of the best lines in the whole opera, but she only appears in two scenes.
And in both scenes, she has this sense of dread.
I am very interested in the psychology of an unhappy marriage that we can explore in great depth. And by building a world in which they can witness the events, there is the ability to absorb all of the drama that's happening in such a short period of time.
There’s an image I've had since the very first day we started working on this: I have this photograph, a research photograph that I love, of this old couple reading a newspaper and they just seem…unhappy. Complicated. I love that. I love the way people settle into marriage, for the good or for the bad.
Now look at this:
This picture just kills me. I love it so much. This to me is like the Wotan family, you know? I mean, when you start to really study the faces of this family you just go, oh my God, there's a lot of unhappiness here. A very, very wealthy Florentine family that still has all their palaces and all of their money and everyone's dressed in muted colors and then this one rebel puts on a white outfit, which I'm sure she was told not to wear, but she did it anyway.
And then this woman over here just wraps herself in this weird orange scarf. You know, just to give herself a little sass or something, or to set herself apart. .
You can study these faces for hours.
Power.
That burden of power across all of their shoulders.
You know, I didn't think about it this way for a long time because I really focused on Wotan, and I was kind of ignoring Götterdämmerung for a long time, but then I realized that Alberich comes back in Götterdämmerungand he has a child, and I was like, oh, this isn't just about Wotan…
It's really about people grabbing for power, and maintaining it, and passing it on. It's not just about one person.
Sneak peek: Set design for The Legend of the Ring
Can you bring us right to your creative writing desk right now? Anything that you haven't yet cracked in the production? Anything that's strange or odd?
You know, something that's bothered me about The Ring, and The Legend of The Ring, is that the dramaturgy isn't always great. That's not a David Seaman thing, that's a Wagner thing, actually.
There are threads of this story that actually never resolve, and threads that don't actually make sense. And I just have to accept them. For example, The Ring doesn't actually do much. The whole opera is about this Ring that's supposed to give you all this power, but The Ring doesn't do anything for anybody, good or bad! The only power that's ever displayed in this opera is the power of putting on the Tarnhelm, which just allows you to change into a different form.
But that’s not what the opera’s called.
You know what I mean?
It’s almost as if the actual ring is kind of irrelevant.
So that’s one odd thing…
And then, because I'm doing this in a contemporary production, we went back and forth a lot about weapons, swords-versus-guns, things like that.
We’ve decided to use a mix of guns and swords, and no stage combat because I don't really like stage combat - it always feels fake to me. I’m thinking about ways of staging those fights and killings more like in the way I did those murders in Elizabeth Cree.
The magic is tricky, so there’s that… People turn into frogs and dragons and avatars of other people. I’ll have fun with all of it, but it’s these weird moments where Wagner requires magic magic and just expects you to figure out how to do it.
Like Brünnhilde being put into the fire. These are the wonderful conundrums of staging.
Ultimately, I want to have fun with the piece, to make it feel relevant, and work to extract some of the interesting psychological resonances that make people want to see and hear these stories repeatedly over time.
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