Ten minutes in and one of our main characters, a ghost, has an erection seven feet long, an inflatable prop that requires a stagehand to hold it and move it while the actor moves around.
Thus we are notified that Lincoln in the Bardo, a new opera based on the 2017 book of the same name, will have moments of levity despite being a ghost story transposed to operatic format. Appropriately, we saw it on Halloween.
The bardo is a Tibetan Buddhist term for a sort of afterlife waiting room, a space between this life and whatever’s next. The main characters are the ghosts in a cemetery, startled by the newest arrival, a boy named Willie, the son of President Abraham Lincoln.
The ghosts do not know that they are dead. They think they are sick and refer to the cemetery as the “sick yard” and their coffins as their “sick boxes”. They are frustrated by their loved ones who come to visit but do not stay long, and they hide from angelic figures who occasionally come through the sick yard offering their hearts’ content if only they will “matterlightbloom” and move on fully to the next phase of existence.
They are convinced that they will eventually recover. The extended tumescence I mentioned above belongs to a ghost who perished right before he was about to consummate his marriage.
That’s the premise. I’ll gloss over details of the plot, which is essentially that “the young should not tarry” and so the ghosts encourage Willie to move on, and during the course of these events Abraham Lincoln visits to mourn Willie until he too can move on.
The staging is beautiful. This is a gorgeous cemetery, with a mausoleum that slides in and out as needed, itself possessed of a removable wall lit by a bright square for scenes set within. One of the supernatural hazards of the cemetery are mysterious tendrils, rendered sometimes as props and sometimes people in costume who continue to writhe slowly throughout the scene. When the ghosts “matterlightbloom”, a pyrotechnic and a screen projection complete the effect of a soul abandoning its form and ascending to a form of light.
This is a limited performance and I recommend it if possible to attend, but I also highly recommend the book: it’s lyrical, almost stream of consciousness from the point of view of the ghosts, pulling you in slowing to the world of the sick yard without simply telling you who said what they were feeling.
Like any ghost story, it’s one filled with tragedy and longing, but also intimacy and understanding; an acceptance of loss, a brave determination to move on. It also ends with Honest Abe partially possessed by the soul of a slave who vows to help him carry the Civil War to its conclusion and avow freedom for all.