Jorge Martín's opera "Before Night Falls" given its premiere recently by the Fort Worth Opera, is based on the memoir by the dissident Cuban poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas. Tortured and imprisoned by the Castro regime, Arenas was forced to repudiate his writings and his identity as a gay man; a few years after escaping to New York in the Mariel boatlift, he was stricken with AIDS and committed suicide. It's a subject with great possibilities, but Mr. Martín, who wrote his own libretto in collaboration with the memoir's translator, Dolores M. Koch, outlines the story without really making the audience live it. The Arenas character, Rey, is onstage for every scene of its 2½ hours of music, singing about his suffering, but it's never clear what it was that he wrote that was so threatening to the regime. And as lament follows lament, Rey never seems to change.
More than Communists, Cubans in power and with influence are machos, and homosexuality is not accepted.
Most of the opera is exposition and lamentation without dramatic tension, so it's a relief when an actual antagonist—Victor, the Castro hardliner—finally starts torturing Rey by burning his manuscript and knocking him around in prison. The most dramatic moment comes when Victor forces Rey to watch a television broadcast of Ovidio, Rey's mentor, denouncing his own writing and that of his friends, including Rey. And although one of Rey's greatest crimes in Cuba was to be homosexual, that fact, though much talked about, gets little expression, except in two gauzily homoerotic group ballets (cue those harp glissandos). Perhaps in deference to the sensibilities of Fort Worth, we never see Rey in a love relationship with a man.
Forth Worth sensibilities?
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