‘Bulrusher’ back in Bay Area as an opera — special secret language intact

Eisa Davis' acclaimed play -- produced by Berkeley Rep last year -- is now an opera getting a world premiere by West Edge Opera Company.

When West Edge Opera opens its summer season this weekend with a world premiere, it’s already bound to feel like a classic.

“Bulrusher,” the award-winning 2006 play by Eisa Davis about a young mixed-race girl growing up in small-town Mendocino County, was seen by many theatergoers when Berkeley Repertory Theatre produced it in 2023.

Now audiences can see and hear “Bulrusher,” the opera. With music by Bay Area composer Nathaniel Stookey, and a libretto co-written by Stookey and Davis, the new work makes its world premiere Aug. 3 at Oakland’s Scottish Rite Center, directed by NJ Agwuna, conducted by Emily Senturía, and starring soprano Shawnette Sulker in the title role. It’s the first commission and world premiere for West Edge Opera under General Director Mark Streshinsky.

For composer and co-librettist Davis, it’s been a thrilling — and often challenging — experience, one that she recently described as unprecedented in her previous work as a celebrated playwright and actress.

“I think it was a bit of a challenge for me, because I’d been hearing these characters’ lines exactly as they are for all these years,” she said. “How do you take a play like ‘Bulrusher’ and make it into an opera when there’s so much music in the language of the play already?”

Today, she says that she and Stookey — both Bay Area natives — had worked together on previous projects and “really started collaborating deeply on the text, making sure that all the changes that needed to be made to make it sing were made, and that it was always going to keep these characters and their story front and center.”

Stookey, whose music has been heard widely in the Bay Area, including in performances by the Oakland and San Francisco symphonies, said he was struck by the richness of the play’s text — and felt it was prime material for operatic treatment. Operas often have one primary character, he noted, but this story was different.

“The depth of the characters was remarkable — each one has the depth of a primary character,” he said. “They were extremely three-dimensional, and that, to me, is the gold standard. It reminded me of Tolstoy, whose characters are three-dimensional and real. That was the lure and the challenge of the play.”

Set in 1955 amid the close-knit community of Boonville, in Mendocino County. where Bulrusher was found in a basket by the river and mostly raised by the local schoolteacher, the characters often speak in Boontling, a dialect native to the Anderson Valley. Bulrusher is fluent in it. And although she’s never seen another person who looks like her, when Vera — a young Black girl from Alabama — comes to town, the two girls become a catalyst for change.

Stookey and Davis have worked steadily from 2020 until now; there were workshops at Cincinnati Opera, an orchestral reading at San Francisco’s Taube Atrium Theater, a Snapshot rollout at West Edge, and more.

Both Stookey and Davis are sure they found the ideal Bulrusher in Sulker; the Bay Area soprano, they said, was their first choice. “Shawnette’s been with the project from the beginning,” said Stookey. Davis agreed: “Her voice has that perfect bell tone for the soprano. Vera is an alto — giving us more of the pain and the doings of the world.” The cast also features Briana Elyse Hunter as Vera, Kenneth Kellogg as the Logger, Rebecca Cuddy as Madame, Matt Boehler as Schoolch, and Chad Sommers as The Boy.

As opening night approaches, Davis says she’s thrilled with the production. “It’s been a long road and a lot of hard work,” she said. “The play already has so much of my heart in it – and that’s what Nat gets so well. He cares so much.

“There are composers who may not be as entwined with the narratives and the text. But we’ve come to common ground, keeping the characters front and center. It’s thrilling to hear it reshaped, and to experience these characters that have lived with me, and I’ve lived with for all these years, having this kind of new expression.”

Contact Georgia Rowe at growe@pacbell.net.

‘BULRUSHER’

Music by Nathaniel Stookey, libretto by Stookey and Eisa Davis, presented by West Edge Opera

When: 8 p.m. Aug. 3 and 15, 3 p.m. Aug. 11

Where: Scottish Rite Center, 1547 Lakeside Drive, Oakland

Tickets: $20-$160; $10 rush tickets day of show; 510-841-1903, westedgeopera.org.