Coco's Song

It may seem a bit far afield to kick off my exploration of recent encounters with vocal music by talking about a play, but hear me out. This past weekend, I went with a few friends (Sarah included) to see the newly created "Fishtank" at Minneapolis's Tony award-winning Theatre de la Jeune Lune. I've been a Jeune Lune fan since I first arrived in Minneapolis eight years ago, and the fact that the company is currently experiencing some very trying times has only made me more determined to drag as many people as possible to every one of their productions, lest we lose one of the brightest stars in the Twin Cities cultural scene. (To that end: if you're planning to see Fishtank before it closes in late March, be aware that the following paragraphs contain a few spoilers. On the other hand, since the show doesn't really follow a standard storyline, you may not consider them spoilers.)

Anyway, Fishtank. I'm not going to bother trying to explain what the show is about, because we'd be here all day. (Those of us who attended together have yet to agree on what it was about, anyway.) Plot is really rarely the point at Jeune Lune, because this is a company that believes in creating a stunning visual and aural impact first and foremost, and worrying about such niceties as linear plotlines only when it becomes absolutely necessary. The show was created by the actors during the rehearsal process, which is how Jeune Lune often works. (The program describes the creative process behind Fishtank this way: "Free as cows at pasture, we roamed the rehearsal room looking for a fence so we could wonder what's beyond.")

Fishtank has four characters - Harry, Jim, Jules, and Coco - and they all spend the entire show on stage in front of a giant glass tank, with only a couple of other minor bits of set design to complete the environment. Again, what happens between them isn't as important as what happens to the way they interact. What begins as clearly casual contact between four individuals who know each other but are not obviously close develops over two hours into an almost frantic collaboration between four parts of the same unit, all of whom are desperate to get at the truth of... something. We don't know what. They don't know what. But whereas such a quest might have seemed clichéd and Beckett-like had it been introduced full-force at the beginning of the play, we in the audience are lulled by the pace of the thing into feeling the same eventual urgency that the characters feel as they try desperately to keep their heads above water, metaphorically speaking.

I should mention (by way of not completely derailing my self-imposed theme for the week) that there is singing of one sort or another throughout Fishtank. Jules, Jim, and Harry are prone to using French karaoke to cheer up Coco when she appears distraught or annoyed, which happens a lot. And late in the show, the boys persuade Coco to favor them with her own voice, which they clearly love, and which is, in fact, so aggressively hard to listen to that I almost had to plug my ears. (The fact that Coco is played by the well-known Minneapolis singer and actress Jennifer Baldwin Peden makes Coco's bad singing even more astonishing. Making music badly when you make your living doing it well is extremely hard work.) I don't remember everything Coco tries to sing, as her three cohorts smile beatifically in the background and a boombox nestled in her lap accompanies her, but I know that the world's most uncomfortable version of Musetta's aria from La Boheme was in the mix.

As the show builds to a climax, however, something remarkable happens. While the characters become more and more desperate to discover the meaning of the limited world in which we are seeing them, and the action gets ever more frantic, a recording of the first movement of Henryk Górecki's Symphony No. 3 begins to play softly in the background. The piece is a seemingly endless slow loop of the same material, layered from ultimate simplicity to ultimate complexity by an ever-expanding string orchestra. It's a deeply emotional thing to listen to for the first time, but since a) I know the piece quite well, and b) I was wrapped up in the action on the stage, I didn't really think anything of the music initially other than to note its presence and try to remember when I'd last played it.

At some point, Coco begins singing along in her tuneless way as the action on stage continues, and her voice provides an unsettling counterpoint to Górecki's smooth textures. But then, as the complexity and pressure of what's been occurring between the characters becomes too much for her exceedingly literal and routine-obsessed mind to handle, she opens her mouth wide and, in an instant, becomes the true operatic singer that the actress playing her really is. As the three men look on in stunned silence, Coco overwhelms the orchestra, singing the top melodic line in full voice with a warm, lush vibrato.

It's meant to be a show-stopping moment, clearly, and it is, as the action on stage literally freezes around the suddenly golden-throated Coco. And here's the thing: I totally saw it coming. Once she was murmuring along with the Górecki, I knew there was at least a chance that we'd be hearing Jennifer Baldwin Peden's actual singing voice at some point during the scene. Furthermore, as I said, I know this piece. No part of its melody will ever be surprising to me. And yet, the moment the first notes of "real singing" burst forth... I choked up. I did. And I had no idea why. It didn't seem to be a sad moment in the show, particularly, nor was Coco expressing any sort of wailing anguish. It was just the simple beauty of the human voice, heard after more than 90 minutes of uncertain speech and halting song, that somehow stopped my brain in its tracks and instructed raw emotion to take over.

"God, I'm glad to hear you say that," said my friend Anne over a couple of beers after the show, as I sheepishly admitted that I'd had to wipe away a tear. "Because the same thing happened to me, and I could not figure out why it was happening!" I doubt we were the only two wondering.

I hate to make assumptions when it comes to music - there's always plenty that we haven't heard yet, and can't imagine hearing until we do - but I've thought about it a lot since that night at Jeune Lune's warehouse home, and I simply can't imagine such a visceral reaction being provoked in me in that same situation by anything but the human voice. Had Coco suddenly begun to play along with the music on a cello, it would have been beautiful and satisfying, but I can't imagine that it would have provided the emotional slap in the face that I got.

I'm not sure why that is, exactly. And since I'm not generally one who chokes up easily at plays and movies and concerts, I'm curious to know what switch in my brain was tripped by that moment. I'll probably never know, but I know this much: I'll be back to see Fishtank again soon, to see whether the moment has the same impact when I know for sure that it's coming.