Backwoods drama, plain and simple

Opera Pacific may not be the last opera company in America to get around to "Susannah," which it did effectively Wednesday night at the Orange County Performing Artscenter, but Carlisle Floyd's faux-folk opera has few stages left to conquer. The irresistible numbers -- well over 200 productions, 700-plus performances -- were trotted out once more during a company sales pitch for new subscribers before the curtain rose.

Yet "Susannah" is a strange success story, and another statistic for the 81-year-old composer of what is said to be the most performed American opera after "Porgy and Bess" is just as startling: Search for Carlisle Floyd on Amazon.com and only 14 results come up. For all the populist appeal of his scores, Floyd doesn't flourish on his tunefulness.

Someone once said of Puccini that he wasn't a great composer but he wrote great operas. A kind of American Puccini, Floyd writes operas that work in idioms we instinctively understand. Audiences respond readily to the Apocryphal tale of Susanna and the Elders transferred to the backwoods of Tennessee and set to music that evokes Appalachia, and the success of "Susannah" has been mostly due to its numerous regional and university productions rather than its being a repertory staple at major companies.

That is not to say that "Susannah" hasn't reached the big time. Nine years ago, Renee Fleming starred in it at the Metropolitan Opera. That production originated at Chicago Lyric Opera, and it is the one used by Opera Pacific. Dawn Upshaw has recorded Susannah's aria "Ain't It a Pretty Night?" Kent Nagano conducted the opera's one studio recording. But for all its popularity, "Susannah" still tends to be treated like a rarity. Wednesday was its first major production in Southern California in a quarter of a century.

Ultimately, I think "Susannah" is best served exactly the way Opera Pacific served it. Michael Yeargan's set offers a handsome craftsman-style cottage and church against a vertigo-inducing background of angled tree trunks, and it is very well lighted by Duane Schuler. Robert Falls' production, here realized by Harry Silverstein, is straightforward. There isn't a lot of nuance in Floyd's characters (he wrote his own libretto) or music. The good, the weak and the intolerant are all plainly drawn.