Director Morris Panych connects with Flight opera's existential airport limbo
At Vancouver Opera, the theatre legend and set designer Ken MacDonald bring artfully absurd touches to story of a refugee stuck in a terminal
Flight, from Pacific Opera Victoria’s 2020 production. Photo by David Cooper
Vancouver Opera presents Flight from February 8 to 16 at Queen Elizabeth Theatre
ON ONE LEVEL, COMPOSER Jonathan Dove’s 1999 opera Flight is about a man stuck at an airport. It was inspired by the true story of an Iranian refugee marooned in Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport for 18 unimaginable years in bureaucratic limbo.
But with legendary stage director-design duo Morris Panych and Ken MacDonald at the helm of the upcoming Vancouver Opera production, expect Flight to soar into even more surreal territory, with the setting and story becoming “bigger and stranger”, as Panych puts it to Stir. This is, after all, the creative team behind the stylized movement-and-music spectacle The Overcoat and Pacific Opera Victoria’s Fellini-esque The Marriage of Figaro, not to mention darkly absurdist theatre hits like 7 Stories, Vigil, and Girl and the Goldfish Bowl.
“It’s a piece of art, and it’s a piece of, for lack of a better word, entertainment,” begins Panych, speaking to Stir over the phone on a rehearsal break from Flight. “There’s a lot of comedy in it, there’s a lot of action, and there’s a lot of different stories going on in it. But at the centre of that is this refugee who’s stuck in this airport.
“Where I connect to it is on an existential level: that people think they’re going somewhere in their lives, and they’re really not going anywhere,” he continues. “My favourite theme about the show is that an airport is just emblematic of the idea that people have a delusion about movement and travelling, and really they’re not actually going anywhere. You know, they’re just trying to escape parts of their lives; we all know there’s really only one real escape from your life. And wherever you go, you bring yourself with you. So there’s that.”
In this production that debuted at Pacific Opera just before the pandemic, set designer MacDonald runs with those more existential ideas. Panych reveals he and his partner drew original inspiration from the groovy, Saarinen-designed 1962 Trans World Airlines Flight Center (recently reborn as the retro TWA Hotel at JFK Airport). From there, MacDonald took it into more symbolic, conceptual terrain, arches inspired by the TWA Hotel stretching winglike over the action, suggesting freedom, doves, and flight.
As for the ’60s touches, don’t take them too literally.
“We like something not to feel just of its time, but of all time,” Panych explains of his and MacDonald’s aesthetic. “So we’re trying to pick periods and styles that have a timelessness. The influences are there, but we just want it to feel like something that everyone recognizes, to feel like it belongs to them—or they could belong in that world.”
Morris Panych.
Panych notes that when he first staged Flight at Pacific Opera, Syrian refugees were fleeing war; now, the work resonates as a new U.S. president starts mass deportations. But the timeless design also feels right for a critically acclaimed opera that defies categorization and walks a unique balance between pathos and comedy. Colourful characters whirl around The Refugee, from the flirtations of The Steward and The Stewardess, to a diplomat and his very pregnant wife. The Controller is always overhead in the stylized flight tower—with a sky-high soprano to match.
“I’m kind of dealing with her as a divinity, in the most mythical sense, in the most Greek-mythology sense,” Panych reveals of the character being sung here by Caitlin Wood. “She’s a kind of goddess who has a connection to The Refugee because he’s there and she’s trying to make him understand that, you know, in a kind of Icarus way, you can’t fly very far. You really get a sense, just even visually, that she is like a deus ex machina, that she’s really there as a god. I would say that there’s a deep spirituality in the show—a deep connection to motherhood and the connection to the individual and identity. It has many of those kind of mythological elements to it.
“There’s a ton of humour in it, but also, on a deeper level, it deals with human existence,” he continues. “So that’s what makes it darker and more profound. That’s another reason I like it, because it’s a tragic comedy. It’s got all those elements in it.”
As for The Refugee (sung by rising Persian-Canadian opera star Cameron Shahbazi), Dove made the unexpected choice to write his character as an ethereal-sounding countertenor. The decision may at first surprise audiences but makes perfect sense to Panych as he revisits and digs further into the work.
“When I first heard the opera, it sounded really strange to me, but almost immediately I recognized the value of a countertenor, because without even trying to do anything else, he’s an outsider. He sounds weird,” Panych says. “It’s like he’s not of the planet, he’s not of the world that these people operate in. So he already feels like an outsider, and that’s just from hearing what he does. And I think that that has tremendous musical value, but it also really leans into the story in a very, very profound and complete way.
“I’ve been sort of saying to the actors that they should actually react to the sound, rather than pretend it’s not there or that it’s normal, because it’s not normal,” he adds. “The countertenor is not a normal sound, even in an opera. But it’s beautiful!”
Flight, from Pacific Opera Victoria’s 2020 production. Photo by David Cooper
As you can probably tell by now, opera has become a world where Panych—a major longtime force on the Vancouver and Toronto theatre scenes—feels at home. Married in 2004, he and MacDonald lived and worked in Vancouver for almost 25 years, but eventually moved to Ontario to take advantage of the stage work there. They still work largely in theatre, and Panych continues to write plays. But they keep coming back to opera, mostly because it offers a scale and feel that appeals greatly to the duo—and surprisingly, a set of restrictions within which this boundary-breaking team can create.
“I love the discipline,” Panych says. “I know this is going to sound strange, but when you work a lot in theatre, people have a lot of interpretations—and they do also in opera, but there are very specific requirements that are nailed down, like moving, notes, timing… So a lot of what is negotiable, and not necessarily in a positive way, in theatre is not negotiable in opera. That’s what it is. And especially in the world we live in now, all bets are off. So discipline, to me, is really admirable. And I think that promotes creativity. Because if things are too open, you just get lost.”
Ultimately, the two love creative visual opportunities, and the opera offers just that. “There’s a tendency in opera for audiences to accept and understand bigger imagery,” Panych reflects. “And I think we’ve always veered away from naturalism. We’ve always loved surrealism, and we love big imagery, so opera just feels like a natural place to play with that.” 
Flight, from Pacific Opera Victoria’s 2020 production. Photo by David Cooper
Related Articles
