A dedicated but insecure ballerina who lives her life on the periphery of her dance company aspires to play the Swan Queen in “Swan Lake.” Nina experiences a wild ride into the shadows of her psyche, once selected. Along the way, she develops a budding attraction for her understudy, Lily, tackles her inner demons and lets out the dark counterpart within her that she must embody for the role. American Repertory Theater’s adaptation of the Darren Aronofsky film “Black Swan” is a gripping musical thriller that invites audiences to journey into the fantasies and recesses of Nina’s mind.
“Black Swan,” directed by Tony Award winner Sonya Tayeh, will run at A.R.T.’s Harvard Square Loeb Drama Center from May 26 through July 5. The production features music and lyrics by composer Dave Malloy, who blends strains of Tchaikovsky with electronic soundscapes to bring the “exploration of ambition, power and the cost of perfection” to the stage. It’s also been shaped by a script from playwright Jen Silverman. Ultimately, that narrative is very much about the price someone may pay for their craft, according to music director and supervisor Or Matias.
“To me, there’s always been this curiosity about what the cost for the artist is of pursuing the highest form of art,” Matias said. “I think that’s something that came up [for me] as a classical pianist and composer … What is the line? How much can we push in order to attain that thing that we think is [the pinnacle]?”
The story of “Black Swan” follows Nina as she’s cast as the ballet’s star, then realizes that while it is easy for her to capture the technical precision and grace of the White Swan, it is more challenging for her to understand the ferocity of the Black Swan.
Meanwhile, she lives with her overbearing and stifling mother Barbara, who keeps her cloistered until she decides to spend a night out on the town with Lily and her fellow dancers.
Nina’s descent leads to a mental health spiral, and as we watch her Doppel, representing her other side, take over, we wonder whether Nina’s belief in what she perceives as freedom is worth the sacrifice.
What can audience members expect? Matias points to a favorite scene, held in the dance studio during auditions. As the performers compete, they riotously break out into the number “God and Beast,” an electric moment in which they almost “raise the dead.”
It’s a sequence full of abandon, replete with raw emotion. Throughout the show, mysterious illusions are employed to create a surreal mood. According to associate choreographer Camden Gonzales, the musical incorporates effortless-looking classical dance but transforms it in a style that is distinctive to Tayeh, “gutsier and grittier.”
For Gonzales, the project’s most compelling element is that it centers female characters more than the film. Shining additional light on the trajectories of the film’s female characters – Nina, Lily, Barbara and also former star Beth and choreographer Margaux LeRoy – the show pays tribute to women in a fuller spectrum of work and life.
“We’re really homing in on the female experience,” Gonzales said. “There are multiple female characters at different moments in their careers, which I find super interesting, and I connect with different pieces of each of those characters.”
One of the most significant creative departures is that artistic director Thomas Leroy, a debatably predatory figure in the film, is no longer a character in A.R.T.’s adaptation. He has been replaced by the renegade Margaux LeRoy, who inspires Nina but unintentionally pushes her beyond her limits. In a program note, Silverman addressed the change and how it presented a unique window for an emerging new role.
“The choreographer of the movie – Thomas LeRoy – is a slippery and powerful man whose pressures and provocations to Nina are sexual; made in 2010, prior to the #MeToo movement, ‘Black Swan’ is teasing a cultural conversation yet to come,” they wrote. “The stage adaptation felt like an opportunity to investigate an alternate set of ideas about the choreographer character.”
Matias explained that he hopes Nina is a protagonist audiences will “fall in love with,” that they will have empathy for someone who is “so hungry to prove what she has, that she will take it as far as she possibly can.” Silverman hopes spectators will identify with the leaps and rushes Nina makes.
“When our Black Swans speak through us, we are powerful and untamed, we throw off the cage of expectation and etiquette – we become reckless creatures of hunger and desire,” Silverman wrote. “How can any of us live like this? But also … how can we not?”
“Black Swan” premieres at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at the American Repertory Theater, 64 Brattle St., Harvard Square, Cambridge, and runs through July 5.
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