From the San Francisco Chronicle, 12 July 1997
Rossini's Mission to Mars
Librettist gives "L'Italiana in Algeri" a Space Age Update for Berkeley Opera
by Jesse Hamlin, Chronicle Staff Writer
Like millions of other earthlings, David Scott Marley is passionately focused on Mars these days. But he had no idea the spaceship Pathfinder had landed there.
Marley has been lost in operatic space, fine-tuning The Riot Grrrl on Mars, his modern-day adaption of Rossini's L'Italiana in Algeri (The Italian Girl in Algiers). The Berkeley Opera premieres it tonight at the Julia Morgan Theater.
"Somebody mentioned the landing to me a few days ago, and I didn't know what they were talking about," says Marley, who wrote the libretto and is directing this comic-book style production of Rossini on the Red Planet. "I haven't seen a paper in days. It's certainly serendipitous."
In the original Rossini comedy, which premiered in Venice in 1813, the buffoonish bey of Algiers tries to dump his wife, marry her off to the Italian slave Lindoro and get himself an Italian girl. He finds the object of his desire in the beautiful Isabella, a passenger aboard an Italian ship sunk by the pirates who'd kidnapped her beloved Lindoro. She uses her feminine wiles to outwit the bey at every turn.
The music and plot are the same, but Marley's loopy English-language update moves the action to Mars, where the king has fallen in love with earthlings from watching American TV. He can only pick up Nick at Night, so he thinks Earth women are all like Donna Reed and June Cleaver, "domestic creatures who bake cakes and walk around the house in pearls," Marley says.
He recast Isabella — an archetype of the strong-willed Italian woman in the commedia dell'arte tradition — as the Riot Grrrl, a Generation X punk rocker. She flies to Mars in her homemade rocket to look for her boyfriend and band mate, Mosquito, who was kidnapped by a UFO.
"My primary intention is to re-create something new, which will work for this audience on the same terms that the original worked for the audience of its time," says Marley, who last season updated Strauss' Die Fledermaus for Berkeley Opera. (He turned the Eisensteins from upper-crust late 19th century Viennese into modern-day Berkeley yuppies).
"You're reinventing it to make it fresh again. I take a lot of liberties but remain faithful to the original spirit."
The idea of setting the hilarious L'Italiana on Mars came out of a brainstorming session between Marley and his lover, Dave Nee, who owns the Other Change of Hobbit science fiction and fantasy bookstore in Berkeley.
"I'm not sure who it was, but one of us said the only way to do it would be to set it in some total Never-Never Land," Marley says. "The plot starts with the tenor being kidnapped and sent to Algeria as a slave, and that's not funny anymore. People are being kidnapped and held hostage in Algeria today. What are you going to call the piece, The American Girl in Tehran? I don't think so."
Algiers, he says, was a remote, exotic locale to 19th century audiences. "You could do pretty much what you wanted to because hardly anybody in the theater was going to know any Turks or have been to Algeria. You weren't going to be picketed by the Algerian Anti-Defamation League. I don't want to offend anybody. The story isn't funny when you know these people might really exist."
In commedia, Marley says, "Isabella is the Italian woman. She's practical; she uses her feminine guile to get what she wants. A 19th century audience knew that in any plot about the Italian woman, she'd come out on top. It's like tuning in to an episode of I Love Lucy: As soon as Lucy and Ethel walk onstage, you know who they are, they're funny from the word go. That's how commedia worked. I wanted that same sense of immediacy.
"Even if people haven't heard of Riot Grrrls — postfeminist punk rockers who tend to be incredibly smart and into gender politics — they'll know just from the title that she's not a shy, demure creature, and she isn't going to lose."
Marley tells the story with original rhymed lyrics: The earthlings talk in slangy '90s lingo, while the Martians speak in the square style of '50s sitcoms. They move around the comic book-inspired sets with antennae bobbing on their heads.
In the original, Isabella takes one look at the king and sings, "What a mug!" The Riot Grrrl sings "What a throwback! What a classic! Man, this fossil's pre-Jurassic!"
"Nowadays when audiences go to a production of L'Italiana, as wonderful as it is, they don't get all the fun unless they've read the footnotes. And footnotes aren't funny. If this opera doesn't make you roll in the aisle, it's not working."
Marley's life work is writing librettos and musical comedy, but he makes his daily bread writing and editing crossword and logic puzzles. He's the editor of Dell Logic Puzzles magazine.
The puzzle work helps his libretto writing because "you're dealing with little ministories," says Marley, who has a psychology degree from the University of California at Irvine.
"The story part of the logic puzzle is setting up a situation very efficiently. I've been able to use that commedia dell'arte sense of creating a character very quickly, one the solver will understand because it draws from a common archetype. There's that affectionate sense of satire, recognizable characters with recognizable foibles. I like that."