Adrift on a sea of drama

Art imitated life on the day of the premiere of Balseros, an opera with music by composer Robert Ashley and a libretto by playwright Maria Irene Fornes.

On Friday morning, a front-page story in the Miami Herald reported the plight of a group of Cubans discovered on a barren island in the Florida Straits where they had been marooned for two weeks without food or water. Their journey by raft from Cuba to the United States and hoped-for freedom ended in disaster as two children and a man died before the group was rescued.

That night, the Florida Grand Opera production of Balseros _ from the Spanish balsa, meaning "raft" _ opened to a full house at the Colony Theatre, where it continues through Tuesday night.

Ashley and Fornes, both in their 60s, brought impeccable avant-garde credentials to Balseros. Their collaboration made for an intriguing merger of experimental art with sociopolitical concerns that are more like the stuff of old-fashioned grand opera. The Cuban exodus to South Florida is one of the great dramas of the 20th century, and somebody finally wrote an opera that tries to tell the story.

It is a far cry from conventional opera. From a temporary pit in the front rows of the former movie theater, Ashley conducted his score, which consisted of a multilayered swirl of taped music by "synthesizer orchestra" along with the live performance of a pair of Cuban drummers on an assortment of percussion instruments. Elsewhere in the theater, an engineer manipulated the sound through a mixing board.

Up on stage a cast of 11 equipped with wireless mikes sang in three distinct vocal styles and two languages.

Singing primarily in English were Ashley's four-member company, including noted vocal experimentalist Joan La Barbara, and five other singers of classical bent from Florida Grand Opera. There were also a man and woman singing in Spanish. Under director Michael Montel, all of this was more or less artfully incorporated into the performance, depending upon how literally you wanted to take it.

Literal-mindedness was not, however, an asset in understanding Balseros, which had the abstract, trancelike quality of an underwater dream, with turquoise shades of lighting and black and white photos of drops of water projected on panels that boxed in the stage. Dressed in white, the singers were positioned on and around a rectangular platform hydraulically powered to pitch and yaw like a raft adrift in the sea.

Balseros has been described as another in the line of "CNN operas," those written to dramatize current events, such as The Death of Klinghoffer, a 1991 work by John Adams about the hijacking of an ocean liner by Palestinian terrorists. Yet the intentions of Ashley and Fornes seem both more simple and more complicated than mere exploitation of the fad for relevance in opera, though that certainly played a part in the work's commission.

The opera's subject is fraught with resonance in South Florida, whose population includes more than 1-million immigrants from Latin America, with about two-thirds of them from Cuba. Of course, many of the Miami Cubans don't think of themselves as immigrants as much as exiles waiting for the fall of Fidel Castro so they can return to their homeland. Some families have been biding their time in Little Havana for almost 40 years.

There have been periodic mass flights from Cuba since the Revolution, starting with the original influx in the early 1960s and including the massive Mariel boatlift of the 1980s. The latest came three years ago, when thousands of people braved the dangerous sea from Havana to Miami in makeshift crafts of tires and wood and metal sheets from old cars. It's estimated that half those who attempted the 90-mile journey didn't make it.

Balseros is a creative response to this tragic saga that was commissioned two years ago by the opera company, Miami-Dade Community College and the South Florida Composers Alliance. It was well funded with a budget of more than $400,000, including grants from AT&T, the Rockefeller and Ford foundations and a Reader's Digest fund for new operas.

Ashley and Fornes decided to avoid the quagmire of Cuban politics. Instead, after talking at length with 25 balseros, they decided to fashion a fairly straightforward yarn of adventure at sea.

"I was mostly interested in how they did it," said Fornes, who emigrated at 15 with her mother to New York from Cuba in 1945. "What I was interested in was the details of building the raft and the crossing."

Fornes, author of more than two dozen plays, had wanted to call the opera Manual for a Desperate Crossing, and her libretto, though impressionistic in style, is full of specifics. There are 36 brief scenes, each a story told by the rafters. In one scene they somehow distill drinking water from seawater in a device made from a can with a screw-top, a string and a coil from a broken motor.

But human resourcefulness and know-how is not the only theme of Balseros. During an interview at the Colony several hours before the premiere, Fornes dwelled on the deeper emotional issues of immigration: exhilaration and sadness, ambition and nostalgia, gain and loss.

"It seems to be a thing that has existed through the history of humanity, this notion of setting out to find a new world," she said. "It's a powerful drive, the necessity people have of breaking away from their homeland, and it's painful, like a divorce or what somebody has to do to leave a job he has been in for years."

Ashley and Fornes both live in New York, but they worked quite independently of each other to wind up on the same wave length. The composer drew inspiration from the Cuban bolero, which is slower than the Spanish version. "The Cuban bolero is like a slow foxtrot," he said. "It represents a certain sadness, like a lament."

Ashley, who made his mark in the the wild and woolly world of 1960s multimedia art, has written what must be his most purely emotional work. The strongest impression it makes is almost romantic, especially in the lovely arias by La Barbara.

"I had the feeling it had to be rather solemn," Ashley said, taking a break to smoke a cigar before a sound check. "The tone of the opera is nostalgic. They're nostalgic for their homeland. It's not a requiem, but it is a solemn piece."

The audience for Friday's performance included a number of real-life balseros, attending as guests of the opera's sponsors. One was Jorge Del Rio, who survived three days at sea in a four-man raft.

Del Rio, who sported a red necktie with a pattern of oars, was clearly moved by Balseros. Afterward, in the crowded theater lobby, he said in halting English that he recognized his own experience in what had transpired onstage.

"Very good," he said, nodding his head vigorously. "Very good."