The thing is, I’d started to get desensitized to school shootings. Where once I devoured every detail in the news reports, trying to make sense of the senseless, lately I have scrolled right past. Maybe this has happened to you, too. If so, you know the strange guilt of it. The I care, but I cannot care right now of it.
Is this how “normalization” works?
Innocence, an opera about a school shooting that made its U.S. premiere on Saturday at San Francisco Opera, does not let you look away from the horror that has, yes, become normalized in America. It does so without being preachy, or didactic. Written by the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, who died before its San Francisco opening, it is, hands down, the most moving contemporary opera I’ve ever seen.
The story opens at a wedding rehearsal dinner, where the bride, Stela (played by Lilian Farahani) is thrilled to soon be married to Tuomas (Miles Mykkanen). Meanwhile, a catering waitress, Tereza (Ruxandra Donose), recognizes Tuomas as the brother of the man who committed a mass shooting at her daughter’s school, 10 years prior.
While Tereza, as well as the groom’s parents, wrestle with what to tell the bride, seven figures haunt the wedding. Six are students. One is a teacher. In a series of soliloquies and flashbacks, on a revolving two-story turntable set that morphs between wedding venue and school, the students and teacher contrast the joy of the upcoming nuptials with the terror of the shooting.
Director Louise Bakker spares us the shooting itself. You will, to be sure, see red streaks of blood. You will see panic, and lifeless young bodies slumped against a classroom wall. (On opening night, as these visuals multiplied, I noticed only three people walk out; the rest, rapt, couldn’t look away.)
Nearly as agonizing is the characters’ ongoing trauma, its complex layers fearlessly probed by librettist Sofi Oksanen. The waitress resents the shooter’s family for the audacity to carry on with a future that they don’t deserve, while the parents of the groom, and of his brother the shooter, fight incessantly.
The students who survived the shooting can’t stand to be in large crowds now, or sit with their back to a door. They teach themselves to stop talking about the shooting, even though it is the only thing they can think about. For the teacher (Lucy Shelton), her very purpose has evaporated. All knowledge feels useless after the shooting, she sings, in an anguished voice: “Each textbook, stupid. Each exam, superfluous.”
Innocence is about this loss. Not just a loss of innocence but a loss of sense or meaning. A loss, caused by guns, of our common bonds.
All of this would be powerful enough on its own. But in the fourth act, we are forced to ask: who is really innocent? As new, shocking twists are revealed by students Iris and Markéta (Julie Hega and Vilma Jää, both mesmerizing talents), and as further context is added by the groom, his parents and even a priest (Kristinn Sigmundsson), the pain of the shooting becomes more entrenched.
Elevating all of this is Saariaho’s angular, modern-sounding score, matching the mood and timeliness of its subject perfectly. Jää’s usage of Finnish folk singing adds to the story’s realism, while an off-stage chorus and surround-sound effects lend further gravitas to the tension, discomfort and sorrow. Over time, the revolving set designed by Chloe Lamford transforms entirely. All together, it’s an opera that feels like a movie, both in style and length; the whole thing runs just an hour and 48 minutes.
Innocence is based on a 2008 school shooting that occurred in Saariaho’s native Finland. At the time, this was a rarity for the country, but two months ago, just outside Helsinki, a 12 year-old brought a gun to school and shot a classmate dead.
Meanwhile, I can’t count the number of school shootings in America. Can you? Since Columbine in 1999, there have been 118 active shooter incidents reported at K–12 schools in the United States. A total of 1,243 have been injured, and 440 people killed. Teachers, children, all with futures. All shot down dead.
This was supposed to be an opera review, I know. But as a work of art, Innocence is just that masterful, to shake you out of your complacency, to keep you thinking about it for days afterward. And to never take a school shooting for granted again.
‘Innocence’ runs through June 21 at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco. Details here. SF Opera has also convened Beyond Innocence, a series of panel discussions on gun violence and its effects. Details here.
