Upon receiving the initial invitation to respond to Roulette’s revival of Robert Ashley’s “experimental opera” about the “concerns, behaviors, and speech patterns” of elders, Celestial Excursions, I was, frankly, terrified. Though I am a dramaturg and should be able to pass, at minimum, an exam on Opera 101, this is, alas, not the case. My orientation to the work felt equivalent to a critic showing up to Soho Rep unfamiliar with plays as canonical as Romeo and Juliet or The Glass Menagerie. Nevertheless, I decided to attend the piece – which premiered in 2003 at La MaMa – and, as it turned out, my relative inexpertise sensitized me to some of the fundamental qualities of performance and spectatorship within it. In particular, my perspective illuminated the ways these qualities both aligned with and diverged from experimental theater conventions with which I’m more familiar (and perhaps the extent to which the boundary between opera and theater is artificial and socially connoted).
I often find that, in performances, particularly outside the realm of linear narrative, either language or image often serve as an anchor, reeling me into the world of the piece and its rules. Although the piece is an extension of Ashley’s interest in the intricacies of everyday spoken language (Celestial Excursions was inspired frequent visits to an assisted living facility, also the setting of Act II) – that wasn’t quite true here. The modest, spare set’s centerpiece – a single elevated chair – with the singers (all much younger than the elders with which the piece is concerned) seated behind a long table of individual mics and water glasses, libretti in hand (or on an iPad). The piece feels like a cacophony of sounds and, most notably, words. It was, and became, impossible to hear and understand everything – sometimes anything. This auditory effect firmly situated the piece within the realm of experimental performance where intention more often lies in a sensory experience than in singular stories to be digested. This opera, and this kind of mounted performance work, is not necessarily meant to be engaged with as text, in the way an English class might teach us. That was observable both in the execution of the piece along with the behavior of the spectators.
This extended, too, to the rules of the space, which felt more accommodating of behavior often considered disrespectful or inattentive at what is labeled “theater” in the United States. During the performance, people were gracefully, yet unapologetically, getting up to use the restroom, closing their eyes and nodding their heads to the music. While this refers to only a few people I saw, it didn’t feel like the violation that it often does at the The-a-tuh™. This, perhaps, was informed by the largely absent expectation of comprehension, or a steady build toward catharsis – anything even vaguely Aristotelian for that matter. This is the kind of narrative structure that is often considered most “inaccessible,” and, indeed, there’s an impenetrability to Celestial Excursions, a viscerality that can’t be grasped intellectually. But the piece seemed to possess a somewhat equalizing force: in its attempt to capture the chasm in communication that can emerge between us and our loved ones as they age, it is arguably no less confounding for those seasoned in consuming experimental art than anyone else.
There was, too, a humility to the presentation of the piece that distinguished it from the (probably-very-stereotypical) notion of opera in my head. This was, to some extent, realized through the staging, but also the speak-singing style in which the vocalists’ technical prowess can’t really be comprehended by a layperson. There is no awe at the soprano hitting a high note, no “star vehicles”, no extravagant costumes. While much about the work could be situated in the context of the postdramatic, those characteristics in particular reminded me of one of the central tenets of such art: its rendering of performers as vessels or vehicles more than fully inhabited characters.
This also extended to the metatheatrical framing that begins the piece: its second song, “Characters,” explores the relationship between “fictitious characters” and “real ones” – what distinguishes them. Although Celestial Excursions is primarily adapted from Ashley’s observations of old folks (he himself was 73 when it premiered), this song does feel like an embodiment of his own point of view, sometimes employing the first person. Its lyrics essentially posit that acquiring “authority” over a work of art is synonymous with acting as if one is its author, citing as an example that the conductor of a work by Beethoven is “pretending” to be Beethoven himself. Although the staging – more akin to that of a panel with the vocalists’ gaze directed at the audience, than a traditional performance – infused the piece with a sense of fourth-wall breakage. Such explicit lyrical and thematic self-consciousness was introduced in the first few minutes though not woven throughout the piece. I had initially been delighted and captivated by the prospect that it would persist. Thus, although I generally embrace some dissonance and subversion of expectations, on a personal note, I mildly resented that the aspect of the piece that first hooked me lacked consistent integration.
Through Celestial Excursions is framed for the audience, as a piece about aging and the elderly, this may not have been apparent to anyone who went into the opera without context. A less-informed audience member may have described the piece as being about isolation, abandonment, invisibility, and stagnancy. The production sought to use these aspects of growing old as metaphors for feeling unseen/-heard, but in doing so may have eclipsed its own intentions. In a piece that is so elusive and impenetrable (successfully so), such equivalency lacks resonance; it requires greater specificity and nuance– particularly in the United States of 2025. This is particularly notable in Act II where the vocalists describe themselves as “prisoners” and plead for asylum. While the process that Ashley chronicles in the piece– of losing one’s community, the ability to understand and be understood– does not discriminate, its consequences are certainly not felt equally. While this sense of ostracization is not to be diminished, these analogies only underline the comparable freedom experienced by those who are able to navigate it in an assisted living facility like these “characters,” if one can describe them as such. I say all this not as a moral judgment – I don’t think the piece is inherently “wrong” or “bad,” but I do think these aspects of it are especially fraught given the context in which the piece is being performed.
Despite my uncertainty about clarity, especially if not articulated in a program note by the late Ashley himself, I was deeply moved by the idea of the piece’s preoccupation with the elderly. In particular, the satisfying marriage of content and form (or, perhaps more accurately, structure since the piece deviates from what we typically consider “opera” as a form). Experimental performance is often critiqued for its perceived lack of logic, but there is great sense in reflecting the “broken thoughts” [and] disconnected timelines” of the elderly through a piece that is itself intentionally disjointed. In the aforementioned note, Ashley attributes his fascination with the elderly to their lack of a future and the permission this gives them to break the rules. “Rules” are so deeply associated with opera. This is a reductive association. Making in this genre that relishes those who violate rules, and encourages audiences to merely be present while viewing, comes across as a radical act.
Photo of Robert Ashley.
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