‘The Listeners’ Offers a Chilling Take On Disillusionment and American Despair

One night, when I was a teenager, I went outside to retrieve something from my car and came face to face with wildness. At first, I thought it was the family dog and I stretched my arms out to it. Only when it turned its ringed eyes on me did I see it: a raccoon. Silly, really, but the sudden realization of my mistake sent chills creeping up my spine. I hadn’t recognized it, but it recognized me. I retreated, disturbed, the hairs on my neck standing up.

Missy Mazzoli’s latest opera The Listeners, making its American premiere at Opera Philadelphia, begins with a very similar encounter, but that spine-chilling feeling is where it stays.

Mazzoli and long-time librettist Royce Vavrek have established themselves as opera’s queen and king of creeping dread, producing works of psychological horror that give A24’s last half-decade of films a run for its money. Proving Up, their collaboration from 2018, feels like a spiritual ancestor to this piece and sees a pioneer family slowly lose the plot—literally and figuratively. That show excavates the violent psychic wound at the heart of the American Dream, set at the height of its mythic allure. The Listeners tracks the inevitable inheritance of that same wound in the era of disillusion: the alienation, the fanaticism, the opportunism that leads to wellness scams, conspiracy theories, and media-savvy cult leaders.

When we meet Claire Devon, she’s in the middle of a stare-down with a coyote (dancer Sydney Donovan). She recognizes herself in its wildness. She stretches her arms to it, and, unlike me, she doesn’t back away. Only when she begins howling at the moon in her nightgown do we find she has a family. We learn that she hears a strange humming sound that keeps her awake. Claire—played here by a deceptively warm and wonderfully expressive Nicole Heaston—is a teacher, married to nice-but-checked-out Paul (an increasingly worried Troy Cook) and mother to Ashley. She feels unfulfilled and isolated. Only she can hear the sound, or so she thinks. But one of her students, a depressed boy called Kyle, reveals that he can hear it too.

They find others who can hear the sound at a gathering in a swanky mansion where a man called Howard dazzles them with promises of their potential. They hum together, vocalizing. Howard starts out suspiciously enough. His secretary keeps describing him as a philosopher and a prophet. His hair—a frizzy white bob with uneven layers—is so amazingly awful that he could only be a cult leader. It only gets worse. Claire and Kyle are drawn further into the group; first, they relish in a community that can hear what they hear and who listen to them with equal attention. The coyote slinks in and out, appearing in times of violence. Eventually, Claire becomes so distant and obsessive that her husband and daughter leave her. When Howard is eventually overthrown as an abusive charlatan, Claire—her eyes aglow with simmering zeal—ascends to his place, her hand resting lightly between the coyote’s ears. She’s let the wild thing in.

Played on a dynamic revolving set by Adam Rigg, The Listeners is smartly written and smartly directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz. The moments of dark humor, of which there are many, are startlingly effective, and even when you know where this story is going to go, the opera drags you into its undertow.

What is the sound? Is it government mind control? Collective hallucination? Or is it just the tinnitus of American malaise: that nagging sense that while we believe we are all entitled to prosperity and fulfillment, few get it? The listeners let all possibilities coexist. What matters is how the members each understand the sound and use it to recast their shame and disillusionment into a dark power.

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Throughout, we are introduced to other cult members through brief “interviews,” the actors’ faces captured with a camera and projected in visceral detail on a scrim. A wickedly funny “Instagram Live” segment with Howard, Claire and the cult, followed by an equally funny “Breaking News” segment anchored by mezzo-soprano Guadalupe Paz (making a meal out of a snack part), reflects back the fascinated gawking of the world. It makes one of the strongest cases for the now-ubiquitous hand-held camera work (designed by Hannah Wasileski) I’ve seen.

Vavrek’s writing is excellent; Claire is right on the edge of sympathetic—you just know she’d describe herself as an “empath.” Her daughter, here played with astounding power by soprano Lindsay Reynolds, is the right balance of stroppy teen bitchiness and underlying pathos.  The minor characters, other cult members, are expeditiously and effectively rendered. Thom (a nice turn by Joseph Lim), a skeptic, speaks in clipped scientific hypotheses. One man, played here by the silvery-voiced Daniel Taylor, hears the sound as an erotic pull and speaks in soft poetic whispers of its power. Dillon, a military man, speaks in the language of Reddit conspiracy theories and special operations; poor Angela, Howard’s unstable second-in-command, starts out with a bubbling, “Is this TMI?” hysteria before breaking down spectacularly when she’s replaced by Claire. Rehanna Thelwell, excellent throughout as Angela, was never more heartbreaking and terrifying than when she follows a guttural scream with abject pleas for Howard to “use her.” We know exactly who this fragile woman is.

All the performances in this large ensemble cast were very strong, and Mazzoli and Vavrek gave most of them substantial material to work with. Reynolds, a real stand-out as Ashley, had an immense, cutting soprano that expanded out into the hall. Baritone John Moore was at first flinty and then increasingly brittle as the rapidly deteriorating Dillon. Lindsay Burdette, as Howard, was by turns snively and scary, putting his rattly baritone to great use as a leader who cannot control the eclipse of his power by a much more charismatic force. Aaron Crouch was heartbreaking as Kyle with a soft, sympathetic tenor and open face. Thelwell is a revelation as Angela; completely free of vanity, she sobs, chatters, and gasps, always just slightly too loudly, and sets everyone’s teeth on edge. But the night belonged to Heaston, who showed herself to be a nuanced vocal actor as well as a highly watchable performer; she never loses hold of our sympathies entirely, even as she becomes the most terrifying figure of all: not a scammer, but a true fanatic.

Mazzoli’s score is alive and anthropomorphic; it scuttles with nasty little percussion clicks. It prowls with leaden paws on the keyboard, growing louder and closer. In the choruses, it buzzes and swarms.  It moans with sliding brass and eventually, it roars, crackling with electronics. Sometimes it nuzzles against you with lyricism so sweet and fierce that you can’t help but open the side door to it and let it in.

At one point, Claire sings, “I wish you could feel the hairs on the back of my neck right now.” I could feel mine all the way home.