Music by Jeff Myers – Libretto by Quincy Long
SYNOPSIS
A pair of New York City cops attends a sheeted corpse in a cold and silent morgue. The morgue attendant enters with Elena. The police inform Elena that the dead man, pulled from the East River near the Brooklyn Bridge, is believed to be her husband, Victor. Elena knows it cannot be Victor. Victor is at home in his studio, painting. The morgue attendant uncovers the corpse’s face. It is Victor. A stunned and grief-stricken Elena is escorted from the morgue by the attendant. The police exit. Victor’s eyes open. He looks around, confused, not knowing what this place is or how he got there. Death tells Victor that he is in the morgue and that even now his wife is choosing whether he is to be buried or cremated. A horrified Victor insists that he is alive. Alive! Death exits, smiling. Victor wakes up screaming.
Elena enters in her nightgown. She tells Victor that he is not in a morgue, but at home on his cot in his studio— that he’s had another of his nightmares. Victor insists that he has met and spoken with Death— that the painting of an immense vortex he’s been laboring over for years had somehow drawn him into it— actually inside of it— and that the whirlpool had swept him underwater to Death’s lair. Elena tries to reason with Victor, telling him that this is pure nonsense, a manifestation of his fear of life or failure— that he needs to leave his lonely studio cot and morbid obsession with death and come back to bed with her. But the more Elena argues for life, the more vehemently Victor insists on his vision of Death as the missing piece of the painting that he must now complete. Elena finally relents and goes back to bed. Victor, like his hero Van Gogh, ingests mineral spirits to summon his visions, and falls into a coma.
A mortician enters with a pair of assistants. The mortician prepares to embalm Victor; he again wakes up screaming. An exhausted Elena enters in street clothes to reassure Victor that he’s been taken to an emergency room, not to a mortuary— and that he has poisoned himself. The woman he takes for a mortician is a doctor; the others are nurses. Elena is worried for Victor— worried that his obsession with death is going to actually kill him— drive him to an early grave. The doctor agrees, warning Victor that a mind turned against itself in this way is capable of anything, even of creating the very events it fears most. Elena begs Victor to allow the doctor to administer a sedative that will promote rest and recovery. Victor refuses, convinced that this ‘doctor’ and Elena are in league to emasculate him— to bury him alive in artistic obscurity as punishment for his ‘crimes against marriage.’ Elena erupts, telling Victor that she has had enough of his pride and paranoia. If he doesn’t accept the doctor’s help and at least try to get well, she will leave him. Reluctantly, Victor allows the doctor to administer the sedative; she and the nurses exit. Elena sings Victor to sleep.
No sooner does Elena leave, however, than a pair of funeral attendants enters and bundles Victor into a coffin and into an open grave surrounded by mourners. A priest enters with Elena, now dressed in black. The service for the dead mingles with Elena’s lament that while Victor has found peace at last— as has she— the price has been steep. Victor’s coffin is lowered into the grave as the priest Elena her off. A gravedigger enters and sings a brief coda to death. As the gravedigger shovels dirt into the open grave, muffled thumps and screams of terror issue from Victor’s coffin. He is still alive! Alive! The gravedigger smiles and continues shoveling.