WEDNESDAY, MARCH 2 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE K C3
what could in less skilled hands be
merely an anguished archetype.
The Bulgarian soprano Sonya
Yoncheva made an exquisite Elisa-
beth, her voice lithe and light, a
satin softness that could sharpen
into a blade. She masterfully sus-
tained the new queen’s tension be-
tween duty and desire — and when
she collapsed, you felt it snap.
Strangely, the chemistry be-
tween the lovers was far less crack-
ling than in the opera’s other love
story — that of Carlos and his clos-
est ally (well... ) Rodrigue, power-
fully voiced and embodied by
French Canadian baritone Étienne
Dupuis. The “sweetest bond” that
is their friendship, their bearing of
each other’s burdens, made for the
most emotionally wrenching ex-
changes of the evening.
Mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton
(who will appear in recital at the
Kennedy Center on April 6 with
pianist Jake Heggie) was a revela-
tion in an eyepatch as Eboli, mag-
nificently steeped in the princess’s
desperation and inspiring chills
when her longing curdles into
rage. One of the most command-
ing performances I’ve seen in
years, and a star turn to be sure.
It could be years before I dis-
lodge bass-baritone Eric Owens
from my notion of what a Philippe
II should be — a tempest of suspi-
cion and fury that swirls around a
trembling unloved child. His voice
was never lost in the richness of the
orchestra — in the third act, I half-
expected it to light the pyres be-
neath the pair of unfortunate here-
tics during a gruesome auto-da-fé.
And bass-baritone John Relyea
was more than sufficiently terrify-
ing as the boss’s boss — the Grand
Inquisitor — perfectly insectine
skulking across the stage upon a
pair of spindly white walking
sticks, his blood-red robe cutting
through the monochrome ensem-
ble like a fresh wound.
It’s probably no spoiler to say
that this one doesn’t have a happy
ending — unless, like many of our
heroes by the opera’s conclusion,
the embrace of death arrives as
sweet relief. But at its conclusion
“Don Carlos” offers a profound
vision of what peace might look
like, and what it unquestionably
requires: a flood of daylight.“Don Carlos” runs through March 26
at the Metropolitan Opera, 30 Lincoln
Center Plaza, New York City.
http://www.metopera.com.about the status that comes with it
(like being part of a virtual coun-
try club, Kallmeyer said) than the
visual appeal. Kallmeyer likens
the popular BAYC to the Dutch
tulip mania of the 1630s. Eventual-
ly the bubble will burst.
The NFT enthusiast at the Mint
will essentially be taking home
the rights to a one-of-a-kind piece
of digital art. Verse has sold al-
most $40,000 in NFTs since open-
ing in early February, Kallmeyer
said, with 300 of the exhibit’s
buyers making their first NFT
purchase. Since each piece is
unique, it can be bought and sold
like a collectible.
For some potential buyers, the
fact that NFTs can only be dis-
played digitally (on a phone, on
the Web or viewed through a
virtual-reality device) causes
them to pause. “I don’t know if I’d
want this,” said Jorelle Jones, 40,
“it’s not the same as my art on the
wall.” Jones likens his night in the
metaverse to the experience of
playing Atari as a child in the
1980s vs. what it’s like to play
video games now. He’s waiting for
the technology to advance. “It’s
cool now,” Jones said, “but it’ll be
cooler in 50 years.”
Kallmeyer sees the metaverse as
the evolution of the Internet. And
yes, he created an NFT, called
“Nature,” to depict that progres-
sion: A chrome-colored man,
hunched over and lumbering on
all fours like a primate. He consid-
ers the work, which sells for 1.5
Ethereum or around $4,000, to be
a comment on humanity’s role on
Earth. “Are we part of nature or
separate?” Kallmeyer asked. “If a
human makes a building, a holo-
gram or the Internet, are those
part of nature too? I would say yes.
Most of our lives are enabled by the
parts of us that are in the cloud.”
Stenfors, the futurist, would
like to see the metaverse used to
facilitate more personal connec-
tion. Maybe her activity tracker
would notify friends that she’d
only had five hours of sleep, so
they’d know why she’s cranky
while sitting down to coffee to-
gether, without her having to say
so. “We could share a lot more
than in real life,” Stenfors said.
But do we want to render the
question “How are you?” obsolete?
Being in this altered state is
taxing, even for digital natives
like 6-year-old Kaelyn. Before her
30 minutes with the HoloLens is
up, Kaelyn pronounces herself
done. “I have a bigggg headache,”
she said.
Her dad removes her glasses.
For the young girl, the dragons
and ballerinas are out of sight,
though still spinning, breathing
and up for sale for those of us
wandering through the metaverse
with cryptocurrency to burn.Peter, who’s waiting patiently
in line behind me, says that yes,
we’re in a version of the meta-
verse. He declines to use his full
name because he works at Meta,
the company formerly known as
Facebook, which is working hard
to convince the world that this
next version of the Internet will
be awesome.
The term metaverse was
coined 30 years ago by novelist
Neal Stephenson, who imagined a
science fictional universe where
avatars inhabit a virtual world
similar to our physical one. Pe-
ter’s boss, Meta co-founder and
chief executive Mark Zuckerberg,
calls the metaverse “an embodied
Internet where you’re in an ex-
perience, not just looking at it.”
Like walking through an exhibit
of 3D art, going to virtual concerts
or conferences.
In the metaverse, paper money
is replaced by cryptocurrency,
which you need to buy the art
dancing before your eyes at the
Mint. Each NFT costs between $25
and $250,000, though they’re
priced in various cryptocurrencies.
The NFT craze has already
ensnared Melania Trump (she is
selling 10,000 NFTs for $50 each
to celebrate moments during her
husband’s presidency), Paris Hil-
ton and the descendants of Pablo
Picasso (who created a digital
spinoff of the Spanish artist’s
work). An NFT of NSA whistle-
blower Edward Snowden sold for
more than $5 million last year.
But wandering through the
Mint, Sari Stenfors is skeptical.
Everyone is talking about the
metaverse, Stenfors said, “but not
so many people are actually visiting
it.” A self-described “futurist” from
Berkeley, Calif., she stands in front
of a television screen that projects
fiery wings off her back. Stenfors
thinks she resembles a heavenly
creature or something from hell —
she’s not sure which. “I keep feeling
like I’m at Burning Man, but I want
to touch and interact more,” Sten-
fors said. “Touch is needed. I’m sure
it’s going to come. Smells. We’re
going to get it all.”
Later she straps on a
HoloLens2 — a bulky $3,500 pair
of glasses from Microsoft — and
tries not to bump into anyone.
Being transported to another
world is uncomfortable. For my
maiden voyage, the HoloLens is
screwed on too tight and leaves a
mark on my forehead that’s visi-
ble hours later.
MEMO FROM C1
Metaverse
menagerie
cal that has just been announced
for Broadway in the fall. The
timing of “English,” in fact, sud-
denly has even more resonance,
as a reminder that the aggressive
public face of a country, whether
an Iran or a Russia, does not fairly
represent the face of its public.
The set by Marsha Ginsberg is
an ingenious three-dimensional
translation of the script: the class-
room, lighted vividly by Reza Beh-
jat, is embedded in a cube-like
box placed on a turntable. It’s sort
of a world unto itself, an oasis of
self-discovery in the Karaj, Iran of
2008 that Toossi envisions. Inside
the room, the characters reveal
themselves in incisive ways,
through their facility or frustra-
tion with the course’s challenging
subject matter.
The high caliber of the per-
formances enhances Toossi’s con-
struct; the effect is such that you’d
gladly follow the actors out into
the communities their characters
inhabit. Ashe is superb as the
most abrasive of the pupils, a
woman resentful of the rules and
yet desperate for approval. La-
lezarzadeh and Mohseni find the
touchstone gentle and poignant
attributes in Goli and Roya, and
Tabbal builds an effective portrait
of the most enigmatic of the char-
acters, a man whose rationale for
enrollment is less than transpar-
ent and, as a result, adds to the
proceedings a welcome dash of
mystery.
In the pivotal role of Marjan,
the impressive Neshat embodies
all the touching ambivalence of a
person who has lived on both
sides of the world and no longer
resides happily in either. How
smart of Toossi to recognize that
the teacher of English can impart
the means of linking up while
losing that sense of connection
herself.English, by Sanaz Toossi. Directed by
Knud Adams. Set, Marsha Ginsberg;
costumes, Enver Chakartash;
lighting, Reza Behjat; sound, Sinan
Refik Zafar. About 90 minutes.
Through March 20 at Atlantic Theater
Company, 336 W. 20th St., New York.
atlantictheater.org.son in Canada; for Marjan, Eng-
lish is a psychological keepsake, a
nourishing if fraught emblem of a
previous interlude in the United
Kingdom.
Refreshingly, “English” is not
centrally about the friction be-
tween the mullahs and the Great
Satan. Toossi, an Iranian Ameri-
can who grew up in Southern
California, only incidentally re-
minds us of the political realities
for average Iranians. The women
in the class, who also include Ava
Lalezarzadeh’s Shakira-loving
Goli, cover their heads, but that
hardly locates us specifically in a
culture all that different from
ours. Only occasionally do we get
risibly offbeat indications of the
distance, as when the one man in
the class, Hadi Tabbal’s Omid,
reacts to a Julia Roberts movie
with the observation, “This wom-
an has enormous teeth!”
It is, as the title suggests, in the
struggle to navigate a more useful
universal language that we learn
about the challenge of living in an
isolated society. (Or maybe, we
Americans are the truly isolated
ones?) Adams and Toossi render
this idea skillfully, through an
endearing communicative duali-
ty: the actors, when conversing in
the characters’ native Farsi, speak
with perfect American English
accents. The English that Marjan
demands they use in class is deliv-
ered in self-consciously halting
cadences and sometimes broken
phrases that anyone who learns a
language can relate to.
The device is not applied for
comic effect, as has been em-
ployed in the past in less sophisti-
cated pieces. Rather, it’s a symbol-
ic illustration of the characters’
practical or emotional need to
reach beyond the borders of their
nation in western Asia for a more
expansive identity.
This is yet another fine mo-
ment for Atlantic Theater Compa-
ny, which recently offered up the
world premiere of David Lindsay-
Abaire and Jeanine Tesori’s “Kim-
berly Akimbo,” a moving and
thoroughly delightful new musi-THEATER FROM C1‘English’ speaks to youin a universal languagesian soprano and longtime Met
superstar Anna Netrebko de-
nouncing the war in a Facebook
post, while rejecting any expecta-
tions of artists to “voice their polit-
ical opinions in public and to de-
nounce their homeland.” Netreb-
ko has recently had engagements
with the Bavarian State Opera
canceled and has withdrawn from
performances at Zurich Opera
House.
Other institutions are also re-
sponding to the situation as it un-
folds, including Carnegie Hall,
which last week canceled appear-
ances by pro-Putin musicians: the
conductor Valery Gergiev and the
pianist Denis Matsuev. Netrebko,
who knows how to sound a defiant
note, opted for subdued defiance
on Tuesday, posting a photo to Ins-
tagram of her and Gergiev, hand in
hand. (Her account is now private.)
Verdi himself was entering a
time of both personal and political
turmoil when in 1864 he was asked
to compose a work for the Paris
Opera. For one thing, at least one
Italian critic had already declared
“the so-called Italian school” ka-
put. (Verdi fantasized in a letter to
a friend of composing “for no other
reason than to make them angry.”)
A letter from 1865 finds him won-
dering how he could pull it off:
“Write for the Opera, where the
performances last half a day? Poor
me! What a lot of music, or rather,
how many notes!”
For another, Verdi’s composi-
tion of the opera was set against
the tension and outbreak of the
Austro-Prussian war, which
threatened his home as well as his
homeland. In 1866, he said in a
letter to a friend that he “would
not know how to write a note” and
was “ill in a thousand ways.”
As such, this opera “born in fire
and flames” creates a world on-
stage that feels both unfathom-
ably distant and impossibly close,
OPERA FROM C1
Met’s ‘Don
Carlos’
resonates
in the now
Brigitte Reiffenstuel’s cos-
tumes, too, bridged the distance of
history with personal touches, fil-
tering historical accuracy through
a lens of old Hollywood glam —
her surfeit of fur and feathers lent
the savagery of the Inquisition an
uncanny elegance.
Much will be said about this
production being the rarely staged
five-act version based on the origi-
nal French libretto by Joseph
Méry and Camille du Locle. And if
it’s hard to imagine why such a
thing is a big whoop, one only has
to experience the scale of the
whoop itself. Restored to full form,
with most of the many cuts made
in the opera’s early stage to make it
more portable and palatable,
“Don Carlos” attains a grandest-
of-grand level of spectacle and
force almost immediately, and
scarcely ever lets up.
Tenor Matthew Polenzani sang
Carlos with a finely attuned sense
of drama and a sweetness unex-
pected only if you take his plea for
“a future full of tenderness” in the
first act as a passing fancy. He
made a deeply human Carlos out ofas though the lovers were impris-
oned in your chest. This tension
was skillfully wrought in Yannick
Nézet-Séguin’s sensitive leader-
ship of the Met Orchestra, who
brought nuance to every note.
Nézet-Séguin was also especially
skilled at, and interested in, creat-
ing striking relief around Verdi’s
more preternaturally modern mo-
ments. (I like to think it matters
that he heard Wagner played for
the first time in Paris in 1865.)
David McVicar’s staging, too,
found ways of overlapping grand
spectacle and sharp internal psy-
chology. The stage, flanked by co-
lossal towers, was here a plaza,
there a prison — a spatial realiza-
tion of the hermetic seal of Inqui-
sition and the dark chambers of
the heart. At the outset, a massive
censer swung slowly like a pendu-
lum over the stage to the toll of a
distant bell, leaving a trail of
smoke that settled into the misty
forest where the lovers discover
each other. At times, white washes
of garish daylight poured in from
the wings, a reminder of realities
kept at bay.KEN HOWARD/MET OPERA
Sonya Yoncheva, left, and Meigui Zhang in Verdi’s “Don Carlos” at
New York’s Metropolitan Opera.“that looks like real art,” she said
of an animated illustration of a
reclining woman taking a selfie.
But she wasn’t convinced.
“In covid, we’ve constantly
been on screens, and I’m craving
more of a physical experience,”
Lindman said. Though her jour-
ney through the metaverse did
involve leaving the house, she still
felt disconnected from those
around her. “Would I want to go
to a gallery to see a bunch of NFTs
in the future?” Lindman asked
herself. She’s not so sure.
Xiaochen Yang, a 32-year-old
San Franciscan who works in art
and design, has traveled to the
metaverse before, when the Holo-
Lens was in a rudimentary state.
Though the technology has
evolved, and her walk through
Verse is “pretty vivid,” she still
feels like she’s wearing a shield
and heading off to battle. People
go to galleries for people-to-peo-
ple interactions, Yang noted, and
wearing heavy glasses adds “an
additional layer of friction be-
tween humans and the art.”
“As an artist, I’m not convinced
this is the route,” Yang said. “Most
people thriving in this communi-
ty, they’re investors, not artists.”
Are the images on display at
Verse art, money or both?
Kallmeyer freely admits that some
NFTs — like the Bored Ape Yacht
Club’s primate illustrations, two of
which are on display at Verse —
are not aesthetically pleasing. “I
don’t think anyone is looking to
put a Bored Ape in their bedroom,”
Kallmeyer said. Owning a Bored
Ape NFT, which can set you back
$235,000 to $2.8 million, is morebeing on my shoulders is messing
with my vision,” 32-year-old Aar-
on Jones said to his daughter,
Kaelyn, 6. He gently deposits her
on the ground, where she spins
alongside the ballerina and paws
at the other creatures surround-
ing her. The dragon is Kaelyn’s
favorite; “I think it’s majestic,”
she said, before telling the crea-
ture to “get out of my face!”
Jones and Kaelyn have played
around with virtual reality before,
he said, but before they set foot in
the Mint, Jones introduced a new
concept: art. “I was trying to ex-
plain to her that art can be money
and can be traded,” Jones recalled.
Summer Lindman, a 32-year-
old marketer in San Francisco,
showed up at Verse armed with
the cryptocurrency Ethereum she
bought about six years ago, when
it was $11 a coin. (It was hovering
around $2,500 early this week.)
She had never seen an NFT in the
real world and was curious. One
artist’s work caught her eye —minds me of the thrill and disori-
entation that came with the early
days of smartphones. Accessing
email while out and about instead
of seated at a desktop at home,
looking up maps while en route
from Point A to Point B, sharing
pictures of your lunch on social
media before you’d taken a single
bite, or Googling facts about an
old building as you were sitting
on its steps. That was the infor-
mation overload circa 2007.
The newer version on display
at the Mint is even more dizzying.
It’s like having a million tabs open
in your brain and walking right
through them splayed out in front
of you.
Learning to use a HoloLens is
akin to learning to use a mouse
and cursor for the first time,
explained Ray Kallmeyer, the
start-up founder behind Verse.
“We find usually, after 30 to 60
minutes, that people are pretty
solid with it,” Kallmeyer said.
“Hop off, because I think youBefore a Verse attendant sends
me to explore on my own, she asks
whether I can see the ballerina
pirouetting down the hallway.
When I reach my hand out in
front of me, its shape is rendered
in multicolored polygons, twist-
ing as I turn my hand this way
and that. Instead of a traditional
art exhibit with plaques on the
walls, at Verse, attendees point
the cursor in their HoloLens
toward a square icon to reveal
who made the NFT, its price and a
little about the artist’s intention
in creating it. This is about com-
merce, after all.
Sure, it’s cool to be immersed in
a forest or walk past glowing lotus
flowers, but navigating it is diffi-
cult. The glasses call for precise
movements, and most Verse at-
tendees are still learning. I aim
my HoloLens at a specific icon,
and if I move my head just a
smidge, the display vanishes.
There’s so much to absorb that it’s
easy to forget to blink or feel
nauseated.
A banner in LED lights beck-
ons attendees to ponder “What Is
Real?” as they wander from one
hologram to the next, potentially
missing a huge artifact in plain
sight: A stamp mill from the late
1800s, used to pulverize quartz so
that gold could be extracted. Ad-
vanced technology for its time
that’s now obsolete. At one point,
I reach out and touch an empty
brick wall to remind myself that
the physical world exists not just
as a container or a backdrop. Tiny
grains of brick dust fall to the
floor.
Wandering through Verse re-PHOTOS BY MARLENA SLOSS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
Visitors to the San Francisco Mint exhibition wear holographic
glasses to see non-fungible tokens such as “Nature,” above.