Review: In ‘Taking Up Serpents’ by Chicago Opera Theater, a young woman tries to escape a snake-loving father

“God gets in the cracks” is the most common lyrical reprise in “Taking Up Serpents,” an intense, 70-minute contemporary chamber opera set among the Pentecostals of southern Alabama, here a community with a dangerous predilection for live snakes.

It’s a cleverly ambivalent resurgent phrase in Jerre Dye’s staccato libretto, worrying as it does over whether the deity’s slippery presence implies judgement or healing.

As composed by Kamala Sankaram, “Taking Up Serpents” is a new streaming production from the Chicago Opera Theater (COT), filmed for cameras in the Studebaker Theatre and under Dye’s own direction. Let us first stipulate that of the many Herculean tasks faced by performing arts groups over the last year, a staged opera has to be among the most daunting, especially one with settings ranging from a dumpster outside a chain drugstore in Gulf Shores, Alabama, to a Greyhound bus to the snake-infested bed of a rural creek.

COT created the production, which premiered online Saturday night, from one single performance, using six cameras and a mix of shots created in real time. A small group of leading performers used the stage, others worked at the back of the house, while the orchestra playing Sankaram’s score did so from distant reaches of the pit, further separated by partitions. All of this was coordinated with conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya via live video feeds.

It would be overstating things to say that the resultant film feels fully realized. Of necessity, it is an eclectic, sometimes choppy blend of the cinematic and the theatrical, of close-ups, split-screen effects and more more traditional swaths of action filmed on a mostly bare Studebaker stage. Given that reality, it’s impossible for the performers to size and scale their work consistently and so those levels vary. But the effort, deep in commitment, captures the milieu and honors characters typified by their strength and resilience. This is a notable achievement under incredibly difficult circumstances.

Commissioned in 2018 by the Washington National Opera, which was looking to encourage new American operas with a running time of less than an hour and an interest in overlooked voices, “Taking Up Serpents” often uses a musical notation called “shape note” singing, a baked-in structural nod for the ensemble to honor the Appalachian congregational evocations of the piece.

In her score, Sankaram suggests that vibrato be avoided by the ensemble, instead encouraging a bright, forward, church-like sound. And that’s what the production delivers, contrasting that deftly with the sounds of the principal performers, Leah Dexter and Michael Mayes, both of whom play wavering characters buffeted by warring inner impulses.

Mayes essays a preacher who is falling off the edge into, well, a snake pit of his own design. Dexter plays his daughter, Nelda, a woman trying to remove herself from dangerous dysfunction even as she is propelled backwards by her own personal history.

If you are interested in contemporary American opera and its complex relationship to the folkic traditions of a specific geography, “Taking Up Serpents” is well worth a watch and a listen. You will hear echoes of bluegrass, jazz and Southern gospel, melded with more experimental formative ideas. Even by the eclectic standards of contemporary opera, this is an atypical operatic orchestration, employing as it does an electric guitar, whirlytube and junk metal, along with the bassoon, French horn and the usual strings. The vocal music is similarly distinctive and provocative.

I think the piece, which was expanded slightly for this Chicago premiere, could use a stronger real-world referent. It’s there in the first scene, which offers the potent experience of watching chain-store employees on their break, singing opera, but once we descend into the more gothic storyline, we sometimes lose what Nelda truly hopes to find on the other side. In particular, the transitional character of Kayla (Alexandra Loutsion) feels underwritten.

But the piece, especially in its first half, often makes highly resonant poetic reaches, depicting as it does the dreams that reside in the hearts of hourly workers in the deep South, often written off as reactionaries by the metropolitan elite.

Matching lyrics to this score was far from easy, yet Dye manages to do so, often with bum-rush words that match the kind of human anguish that can unspool by the dumpster of a drugstore, about as far from some Italian piazza as it is possible to imagine.

“Taking Up Serpents” tickets on sale through 7:30 p.m. Tuesday (ticket-holders have 72 hours to watch); $20 at chicagooperatheater.org.

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

cjones5@chicagotribune.com