‘Crossing’ opera based on Walt Whitman on stage through this Saturday

“What is it, then, between us?”

In this line from his poem Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, Walt Whitman asks what connects and comes between people, whether they are in the same room or centuries apart.

Whitman (1819-1892) gave voice to free spirit and a modern, uniquely American mysticism that zealously embraced daily life, from factories and stockyards to city streets. He inspired contemporaries, including Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and more recently, gifted composer Matthew Aucoin. His opera about Whitman had its world premiere this weekend at Boston’s Citi Shubert Theatre, where it is on stage through June 6.

Aucoin begins the opera, Crossings, with Whitman’s question.

Beautifully staged and magnificently performed, this high-minded and ambitious American Repertory Theater production was directed by Diane Paulus, the ART’s artistic director. The opera succeeds despite its trite plot, which attempts to humanize the epic persona of Whitman by concocting a wayward encounter between the poet and a scheming love interest. Yet it achieves poignancy and depth as a series of richly nuanced arias, duets and ensemble scenes that render what it’s like to be forgotten, isolated, and wounded in a war zone, or in the aftermath of war, as a wounded veteran.

Underscoring the elemental sense of crossing worlds and boundaries is the angular, geometric set by Tom Pye, complemented by David Zinn’s earth-toned costumes and Jennifer Tipton’s subtle lighting. Shifting between moments of havoc and serenity are projections by Fin Ross conjuring churning waters, flames and destruction as well as the moon, sun and stars. Choreography by Jill Johnson echoes the geometry of the set, as four dancers interlock in parallel lines, the better to set off the arabesque lyricism of an embrace.

Aucoin composed and wrote Crossing and for its world premiere conducted the production’s orchestra, A Far Cry, a renowned collective based in Jamaica Plain. Accompanying arias as well as rich choral interludes, the 26 players comprised 13 musicians on strings, nine wind instrumentalists and four percussionists.

Civil War as inspiration

Throughout the production, which runs for 100 minutes without intermission, the many vocal and instrumental threads of Aucoin’s gorgeous music shimmer with expressive textures. Choral and solo passages intertwine with orchestral accompaniment that varies from droning electronic tones and techno drumming to lyrical flute melodies, tuned to the emotional timbre and tempo of scenes rendering moments of confession, transgression, grief and forgiveness.

At age 25, Aucoin (Harvard College ’12) already has an international career as a composer and guest conductor with some of the world’s most renowned orchestras. Paulus invited him to write an opera after she heard his undergraduate opera on American poet Hart Crane.

Crossing is the fourth world premiere produced by the ART, Harvard’s professional theater, as a participant in the National Civil War Project, a collaborative endeavor of multiple educational and arts institutions to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. Other new productions include the Suzan-Lori Parks play, Father Comes Home From The Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3).

Search for meaning

Drawing from Whitman’s poems and the journal he kept while volunteering as a nurse to soldiers during the Civil War, Aucoin imagines Whitman not only as the all-embracing poet but as a man at a crossroad in life. Like Dante, one of Whitman’s inspirations, who in The Divine Comedy journeys through purgatory and hell to reach paradise, Aucoin’s Whitman enters hell — war —and finds himself in the purgatory of “a hospital of souls half torn from their bodies.”

After two years tending to the infirmary’s men, Aucoin’s Whitman asks himself, “Why can I not leave? What is it that I am looking for?”

Whitman regarded opera not as an elite entertainment but rather as an urgent and epic art form. So does Aucoin, who in a program essay writes, “opera is a primal union of animal longing as expressed in sound.”

Resembling the poet as photographed by Civil War chronicler Mathew Brady with his silver leonine mane and beard, Rod Gilfry brings a majestic baritone and warm dignity to the role of Walt Whitman.

The 19 members of the cast, all strong singers and actors, include the 11 men in the ensemble who are the soldiers, each a distinctive and unique presence on the stage.

Tenor Alexander Lewis excels as the haunted and wily John Wormley, who attracts and deceives Whitman. Davone Tines (Harvard College ’09) injects a rich bass baritone and natural self-possession into his role as Freddie Stowers, who escapes slavery at age 13 and then returns to the South a decade later to fight as a Union soldier.

Soprano Jennifer Zetlan, the Messenger, meets the challenge of announcing the war’s end, whirling in a crisp dress and singing at high speed.

In a cleverly staged introduction, when the wounded Wormley arrives at the hospital, he reveals his fears to the audience but hides the facts of his complicated past from Whitman.

Yet Aucoin’s Whitman and Wormley are not characters whose struggles we come to identify with or care about. The poet remains an optimist with a great soul, forgiving and generous, despite a wrong turn. Wormley remains unlikeable almost to the end, when he gains one of the opera’s most lyrical speeches, Whitman-like in its joyous lust for life.

As grand as “Crossing” is in its staging and music, a few details strike a false note. His hand wounded, Wormley gets Whitman to write a letter for him that in code reveals the location and vulnerability of the hospital. But would a hard-pressed Confederate regiment bother waging an attack on a dozen dying men? Aucoin gives Freddie Stowers a prophetic speech with hints of 9/11, a heavy-handed and needless touch.

The production is at its best when, leaving aside the encounter between Wormley and Whitman, it renders the experience of people marooned from life by war. Here, its soundings run deep.

Davone Tines, as Freddie, delivers one of the most riveting scenes. Returning to tell the men that the war grinds on, with 20,000 men killed in just one day’s battle, he slowly sings an aria of fewer than 50 words, and then with a keening falsetto, collapses in grief.

When expressing the suffering and yearning of people isolated by war, Aucoin’s opera demonstrates the power of language and music to voice human experience, in all of its light and darkness, connecting people across time.