This American Commons: A Night at the Opera

Recently, I've really enjoyed listening to "This American Life" with Ira Glass. I've also been reading David Bollier's upcoming book on the commons, "Think Like a Commoner", for ForeWord. (As I am wont to do.) The book is very impressive in many ways, and I found one particular anecdote about an Italian opera house especially inspiring. This is a "This American Life"-style article about an opera I'd very much like to attend.

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They began as fifteen ragtag performers and a handful of out-of-work executives holed up in a giant, abandoned, unheated opera house. But within three weeks, most of Chipiquida City, which is located in upstate New York, has come to participate in what the papers are calling Occupy Opera. It began when the Chipiquida City Opera, after a long and depressing decline, finally ran out of money. Scott Simon, ex-CEO of the opera, tells me how it happened.

“We knew it was coming for a long time. People just weren’t paying anymore.” It should be noted that Scott no longer has a job. (He’s been out of work for most of a year now.) But he doesn’t seem unhappy. In fact, he seems galvanized. He’s hopping around the room, trying to show us what the opera has been up to lately. It’s hard to keep him on topic.

Yes, that’s right: lately. Bankruptcy didn’t end the Chipiquida City Opera: it renewed it. This is Scott again. “This is the classic problem with art: you’re supposed to pay an enormous amount of money for it, but what do you get? You get to sit in a row, stare at a screen above a bunch of histrionic vocalists, and think about how uncomfortable your shoes are. What a dumb idea for the age of the iPhone! It was never going to work.”

This seems like a pretty remarkable statement for an ex-opera director. In fact, Scott says, he was actually relieved when the CCO folded. At last, he could just face the truth: nobody cared about the opera. He could finally move on with his life. That’s probably what would have happened if it hadn’t been for the players.

When the CCO finally folded, the players - the actors who also sing the opera live on stage - had been preparing to perform the opera Carmen. For those of you who haven’t seen Carmen before, there are links on our website. You should really check it out. It’s one of the most colorful and beautiful works of art in the operatic tradition. The story is about a gorgeous woman named, as you might expect, Carmen. A soldier named José falls in love with her and in return Carmen kind of messes up his life. There’s another guy and some smugglers and even a bullfight. It’s set in Spain, sung in French, and it’s a whole lot of fun, with fancy costumes, huge sets, and music as catchy as anything you'd hear on a top 40 station. The performers at the CCO had been looking forward to performing this opera for an entire year.

“No way were we letting this go.” That’s Sarah McMaster, who played the part of Carmen. “They came to us and said that the building would be locked the next day and that they were sorry that they couldn’t pay us, and we told them we were still going to perform.” It was that simple: the players were just going to do it anyway. “It took a little convincing.”

The problem was that they still needed stuff, mostly in the costuming department, but also for the show's technical details. They needed people to operate the lights, people to help move set pieces, and even people to stand at the doors and look bored while taking tickets. (The usual crew, who handles this stuff for the actors, wasn’t interested in sticking around.) So the CCO’s executive board (which was now the ex-executive board) put out a press release announcing the opera's closing and the ongoing performance of Carmen. They also asked for volunteers to help out. They didn’t get any, probably because the news station, WRVV, didn’t actually read the release, but just mentioned the closing of the opera in passing.

Then, something fascinating happened.

Louis D. Freeman plays Carmen’s other love interest, Escamillo. But he’d been in public relations too, and for a long time he’d been bugging the CCO’s executives to start a PR department and put him in charge. “There’s just so much they could have done. Once we didn't need to make a profit anymore, I was like, OK! Nothing to lose, so, you know. I did it.”

First, he hit up Twitter. He pulled in friends, sewing circles, his mom’s church, teachers in the local school. Free opera, he told them. Just show up. No ticket required, no money accepted. Just bring a certain kind of hat that we need, or a belt for Carmen’s dress, or some food for the performers, and we’ll let you in. Crazy, right? Who'd even go for that?

The answer, apparently, is everyone. To say that Carmen was a landslide success would be dramatically underselling the situation the opera players encountered on opening night. Here's Simon: “We were filled to capacity. If we’d been selling tickets, we’d have sold out.”

Keep in mind that when we say everyone, we mean just about five hundred people showed up with random stuff and asked to see the CCO perform. Even in its heyday, the opera had never, ever seen a turnout like this. Not to mention that almost everyone in the crowd had something to donate. Most of it was small, but little things tend to add up. People brought bags of apples, bolts of fabric for the sets, old military equipment. (One guy brought an actual sword once owned by his great-grandfather, a lieutenant in the Spanish army.) But mostly people brought food. “A lot of it wasn’t exactly good food.” This is Sarah again. “We got a lot of cookies.”

Scott Simon had stuck around basically to manage the building until the performers left, but now he saw the opportunity to do something more interesting. “We ended up with way too much stuff for ourselves. There were probably less than twenty people in the show and about four hundred fifty people showed up to watch, and most of them came with, you know, food.” So what did they do with all that food? “Well, we distributed it.”

That’s right: the Chipiquida City Opera started passing out food to anyone who showed up. Scott grabbed some people who’d shown up with nothing to donate and turned them into the crew, made them set up tables and cover them with some donated cloth, and then got them to manage the edibles, all on the fly. “The tricky part was making sure there wasn’t a rush on the food once we had it out. We had enough people show up empty-handed, I just had them walk around and hand out food like servers, unless I needed them at the door. I had a few issues, but mostly people were OK with the deal if they knew they wouldn't get to see it otherwise.”

“It was pretty cool.” Louis smiles a lot when he talks about this part. “There was one woman who actually brought a chicken. I mean, she brought a real, live, clucking chicken. So we were like, ‘what do we do with this?’ and after we talked it over for, like, five minutes, which was basically all we had, we stuck it on stage and let it walk around. I mean, it’s Seville in, what, the 1700s? There probably were chickens. We actually incorporated it into the act, like at one point Sarah cradled it in her arms and sang to it, and characters would complain to it like it was their therapist or best friend or something. It was hilarious. The audience loved the chicken.”

So how did this happen? Is Louis some kind of PR genius? Some svengali of social networking? “Ah, actually, everyone at my old job agreed that I’m pretty bad at marketing. Yeah. Heh. I don’t actually really know how this happened.”

“I think it had to be ours before we started caring about it.” Lisa was in the audience at Carmen. She brought some wooden crates, which she’d seen on the registry that Louis had originally tweeted. “The soldiers’ uniforms didn’t match, and Carmen was wearing these crazy hot pink stiletto heels, and everything that wasn’t out of order was out of place except the acting and the actors and the audience, and we were all just having so much fun.”

In fact, they had so much fun that they decided to do it again with The Marriage of Figaro. Then again with Fidelio. For Fidelio, they started filming, not just the opera, but the audience and the things they would bring. These videos are amazing and you can see them on the CCO’s YouTube channel, all for free. You've never seen opera like this. People come in street clothes or dressed up in outrageous DIY costumes, which adds to the carnival atmosphere. The only donations not allowed are drugs and alcohol. (Until they can figure out some kind of reliable bouncer system, the performances are totally dry.) Every performance fills the house to capacity. They keep having to turn people away, which is bad, because people are now driving from other cities to see this thing. Various blogs and TV stations have picked it up. It’s turning into Chipiquida City’s big draw. People are talking about simulcasting performances to the web, as in, drop something off and you get a one-time code to log into a simulcast service through which you can watch a performance from home. They’re still working on that, and it might not happen for a while. But what's important is that the CCO is back in business.

In fact, they’re doing better than ever. Their heating and electric bills are paid - the benefactors get seasons’ admission, but apparently most of them still insist on bringing stuff - and though they don’t have water in the building and usually have to adjust the program to whatever the audience happens to come in with on the very night of the performance, they still refuse to take money directly.

“No. There’s no way we’re taking money. Never again.” Scott Simon is absolutely adamant about this. “People love it because they see their stuff and their contribution going right into the performance. They love how campy and thrown together it is, and how it has this...communal quality. People make friends here now. And frankly, this was...the people who come in now, they were never our demographic before. Most of our current customers could never have afforded tickets before we went bankrupt. We were...so...ready for something like this to happen. Opera was ready. Is ready. I want to see this happen everywhere.”

“We eventually just took out the seats.” According to Louis, this was a fan’s idea that everyone embraced. Why not? The old seats were uncomfortable and had antisocial armrests that made people feel hemmed in. “We just tossed them and started grabbing stuff off Craigslist ads and getting couches from whoever wanted to get rid of stuff.” They still don’t have any money - that’s the only problem that could trip them up in the near future. Nobody ever gets paid anymore and buying things for the opera is out of the question. Some of the performers are struggling, and of course things like bulbs for special stage lights, which need to be ordered online from a company in another city, can't be replaced on the barter system. For now, they just do without stuff if they can't jury-rig it.

But for the performers themselves, buying things locally outside of the opera is also becoming...less of a problem. The actors get recognized a lot. Local restaurants want them to bring that crowdsourced style, which the CCO is so famous for, into evening performance lineups. In this economically mediocre town, where most people have no education beyond a high school degree, opera is becoming enormously popular. People on the street hum the theme to La Traviata. Teenagers re-watch old performances on YouTube. And everyone, and I mean everyone, wants to participate.

“I was an opera singer for five glorious years!” It turns out that Lisa spent some time as an understudy in New York City in her twenties. “Though I actually spent a lot of time eating noodles and going to auditions, and eventually I married and came home, and that was that and I don’t have any regrets. But now I’m going to play Mrs. Cripps in May and I couldn’t be happier! God brought it back around for me. I always knew He would.”

“It really has been...amazing.” Sarah gets a little teary when she talks about this. “We don’t do this to get rich, and I don’t think we ever will, but I think we’re making more people happy now. Maybe it’ll work out and maybe it won’t. But I think we’ve really got something special here.”

Evidently the rest of Chipiquida thinks so too. Signs are appearing in local businesses and the windows of area homes: “Proud Participant in the CCO.” And the idea is spreading. Just this week, a small, beloved bakery is experimenting with the same model as the CCO now uses. For a few days - just to see if it works - they’re offering free bread to whoever does their taxes for them. Already, they have a few applicants, most of whom know them through the famous Chipiquida City Opera.