Creature feature

PLAYING DIRTY Eric Owens digs into the title role in Grendel.

Prior to the world premiere of Grendel, a new opera by film and theater director Julie Taymor and her husband, composer Elliot Goldenthal, the creators found themselves thrust into the media spotlight for battling a monster far bigger than the title character: a 48-by-28-foot, 20-ton wall, equipped with 26 motors to move it in several directions while holding up to 15 performers. When the wall barely budged during a rehearsal in May, opening night at Los Angeles Opera was postponed for a week.

“We got more press on the wall than on anything else I’ve done,” says an exasperated Taymor, following a shortened yet record-setting run. Now, the monster takes Manhattan: Grendel,cocommissioned by the Lincoln Center Festival, opens Tuesday 11 at the New York State Theater.

“I’m crossing my fingers that it will be dismounted and remounted and work,” she admits. “But honestly, I don’t want to think about it.” After a considered pause, she adds, “Ironically, the wall is the biggest symbol in the piece—the essence of the story is about a wall. So it’s all very ironic, and true.”

Grendel is based on John Gardner’s 1971 cult classic, which takes the 9th-century Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf and retells it through the eyes of the man-gobbling monster—“…a shadow-shooter, earth-rim-roamer, walker of the world’s weird wall.” Although the opera wasn’t commissioned until 2003, the duo had been pondering a Grendel project since collaborating on the 1996 theatrical oratorio Juan Darién, which also featured an outsider protagonist.

“We don’t seem to be able to survive without ‘the other,’ ” explains Taymor, who cowrote the libretto with poet J.D. McClatchy. “Grendel is told by the dragon that he is the shadow that makes the human beings’ light, the one who inspires them to poetry and religion.”

Along with Taymor’s stick-and-slime–covered monster and that massive wall, other eye poppers include video projections, dancers and the director’s trademark life-size puppets. But don’t expect the whimsy of her pink-flamingoed Magic Flute for the Met: While infused with wit, Taymor’s take on Gardner’s tale is decidedly dark—something like The Lion King meets Titus.

Goldenthal’s score has its fair share of bells and whistles, not to mention hubcaps and other unusual instruments. Grendel is the first opera for the composer, who has written several symphonic works but is best known for film soundtracks such as Drugstore Cowboy and Frida (the latter directed by Taymor). While some have criticized his Grendel score as a postmodern polyglot, Goldenthal insists that there’s meaning behind his mix: “The beauty in the story is that it allows me to pit some hard-edged jazz and rhythmic elements with very introspective orchestral colors.”

The composer took an atypical approach to scoring voices—especially that of Denyce Graves, who does a diva turn as a glamorous, gold-hoarding dragon with a trio of Supremes-like Dragonettes rising from her tail. “It’s the first use on the stage of a bass soprano,” Goldenthal quips. “Graves’s range is so large, and I wanted to take advantage of her notes in the male range.” He gave the singer a 17-minute-long aria that slowly climbs from baritone to high soprano. “There’s a tremendously vague sense of gender when she sings,” he adds.

The piece also challenges Eric Owens, who portrays the title character. “It’s pretty much the highest and lowest I’ve ever sung,” he says. “I have to pull out every stop in my technique to make it through the night.” Not only is Grendel one of the largest operatic roles ever written for bass-baritone—he sings for nearly the entire three-hour opera—but it’s also physically demanding: Owens worked with a personal trainer four days a week to build sufficient stamina. “Julie’s got me running around a lot,” he laughs. And, of course, climbing that notorious wall. “Our whole tech period in L.A., we were held hostage by this wall,” he says. “But once we got into a groove, things went really, really well.”

Grendel opens at the New York State Theater on Tuesday 11.