And Now, a Mini-Met

Phaedra, wife of Theseus, spurned and disgraced, twists and writhes in an agony of incestuous love for her stepson Hippolytus. Loosening a white silk sash at her waist, she knots it around her throat, pulls it tight, then falls to the ground in a lifeless swoon, her hair spilling in an orange cloud over her crimson robes. On a balcony overhead, a chorus splits the air with a rising lament--a sort of aural locust swarm--followed by a series of immense, loud gong-tones.

There are a few inappropriate giggles at Manhattan's Lincoln Center, but no matter. The important thing is that French Composer Maurice Ghana's jagged, surrealistic chamber opera, Syllabaire pour Phedre (1967), has found a stage. Together with Henry Purcell's well-known yet seldom performed 17th century opera Dido and Aeneas, Ghana's work last week inaugurated the Metropolitan Opera's Mini-Met--officially known as the Opera at the Forum.

The Mini-Met stage is one that many Girl Scout theater troupes might find modest. Housed beneath the Vivian Beaumont Theater in the Lincoln Center complex, the Forum is a tiny arena theater seating 280. There is no proscenium and no orchestra pit; the musicians, instrumentalists as well as chorus, must squeeze onto a narrow balcony suspended above the stage.

Despite the physical disadvantages, the company has assembled a trio of tightly meshed, highly polished productions. Mini-Met amply fulfills hopes that have been growing for nearly two decades. Early in his administration as the Met's general manager, Sir Rudolf Bing spoke of creating a second opera stage for intimate performances of small-scale works unsuited to a 3,800-seat house, with the dual purpose of providing young artists with wider exposure while attracting audiences not smitten with standard repertory. But lacking a convenient junior theater like Milan's 600-seat Piccolo Scala or Munich's 500-seat Cuvillies Theater, and with no money to build one, the plan lay gathering dust until last spring, when Bing's successor, Goeran Gentele, took it up. Gentele's plan to use the Juilliard School Opera Theater fell through, but the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater, forced by inadequate funding to curtail its season, offered the Forum.

After Gentele's death last July, it fell to Acting General Manager Schuyler Chapin and his aides to map out final details. The resulting three-week season of 25 performances features the Ohana-Purcell double bill, conducted by Richard Dufallo and staged by Paul Emile-Deiber, alternating with a rollicking treatment of Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts, conducted by Roland Gagnon and superbly staged by Alvin Ailey. By sprinkling a few gilded names among the less familiar artists who will get exposure at Mini-Met, Chapin clearly hopes to attract subscribers from the parent company as well as tap a new and younger public. On opening night, for example, a gifted newcomer named Nancy Williams sang Phaedra, while Dido and Aeneas were handsomely dispatched by International Stars Evelyn Lear and Thomas Stewart. The audience reflected the casting: brocaded ladies and black-tie escorts presumably for Lear and Stewart, denim and leather for Williams.

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