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Act I of Michael Gordon's opera Acquanetta, with libretto by Deborah Artman, was commissioned by Theater Aachen in Germany and premiered on June 25, 2005. The opera focuses on questions of identity as personified in Burnu Acquanetta, an exotic actress of uncertain origin, who vanished from Hollywood at the height of her career. Acquanetta starred in the classic 1943 cult horror film, Captive Wild Woman, which launched her to fame as a sexy B-movie icon. In the film, a mad doctor conducts a doomed experiment to transform a gorilla into a woman, transplanting a human female's brain and glands into a simian. The experiment appears to succeed, but then tragically backfires whenever the sensuous and wild woman experiences extreme emotions such as jealousy or rage, and she changes back into the ape.
The vivid characters of Acquanetta — the mad Doctor, the insistent Ape, the Brainy Woman (who reluctantly donates her brain to the experiment), the visionary Director and the beautiful monster herself — speak both as the actors playing their roles and as the film's characters examining the subtleties of the story: who we play versus who we are; what we reveal versus what we hide. Set in the heyday of Hollywood gloss, Acquanetta reveals the characters' inner longings as they wrestle with identity, stereotypes and typecasting.
The original one-act production of this dark and comic opera focused on Acquanetta in Hollywood. The second act, for which a commission is being sought, focuses on the mystery: Who is Acquanetta? This new act continues her story by following the star to Arizona, where she hosts "Aqua's Corner," a late-night horror-movie TV show sponsored by her husband's car dealership. In another scene, Acquanetta's personal mythology collides with her brother's urban American version of their family history. Finally, we find Acquanetta in a hospital bed, not unlike the operating table from Act I, at which point the scenes of her life, both factual and fictional, merge. The stage becomes a confusion/reunion of the characters in her life as they might be crowded in her brain.
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