The Empty Spotlight: On Nicolette Polek’s “Bitter Water Opera”

Bitter Water Opera by Nicolette Polek IN THE PENULTIMATE scene of The Red Shoes (1948), a spotlight strikes the stage. A man presents his hand to a closed door. It opens; there is nothing inside. He spins, and the spotlight spins with him. He leaps, pirouettes, and raises his arms, the spotlight following just beyond his body, illuminating a spot on which no one stands and nothing lies. The ballerina who was supposed to be in the spotlight, we learn, has just died. In her honor, the director has elected to run the show without her, an homage to her brief life. For the rest of the performance, a gaping, illuminated hole sways back and forth across the stage as the ensemble dances around the glowing space she occupied only one day prior. Maybe it is no coincidence that the protagonist of Nicolette Polek’s new novel Bitter Water Opera projects The Red Shoes on her shed—it is precisely moments like these, of strange and arresting emptiness, with which the novel seems primarily engaged. The latest in a series of innovative works of fiction acquired by Yuka Igarashi at Graywolf, Opera is nominally a ghost story: it follows a protagonist neck-deep in malaise as she unknowingly summons the spirit of Marta Becket, a real life ballet dancer who abandoned her career to start a theater in Death Valley Junction. The story goes that Marta’s car broke down one day in the Californian desert. It was there she peered through the back window of a dilapidated theater and felt immediately that she had discovered the second half of her life. Abandoning her friends in New York City, she moved to Amargosa Valley to convert this theater into an opera house for her one-woman shows. She then spent two summers painting a massive mural of a lavish-looking audience along the walls, refurbishing the seats, and generally reviving the town. As Marta puts it in the documentary about her life, “if you are walking through a desert and see a single yellow flower in the dust, that’s me.” It is this now-empty theater, […]

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