Suddenly every 2017 production seems informed by our current politics. Is it me, or is art blossoming in the age of Trump?

Today we saw the John Adams’ opera Girls of the Golden West, which is in its world premier run at SFO. This is very modern music, and mostly recitative, which aren’t my personal favorites. Yet it’s an unflinching tour de force. Based on original material, the opera examines race relations during the California Gold Rush. Several scenes transported me to Charlottesville: gangs of struggling, drunk white miners formed gangs that heckled, beat, raped, and lynched hispanic, Asian, and black strivers and bystanders. If you like modern opera, go see this powerful show that gives a voice to real people from the past.

Earlier this we saw the movie Get Out, which is hard to describe. It’s a horror movie, a spoof on horror movies, a comedy, a tragedy, and a trenchant commentary on US black-white race relations and power dynamics, while being entertaining and well-acted. The commentary part is implicit. This movie never preaches, not even close–that’s its superpower. The horror aspect gave me pause, but it turned out to be fairly mild, though apparently I missed a lot of the horror-spoof imagery since I’m not familiar with the tropes. What’s up with deer?

Recently we’ve been watching Seth MacFarlane’s The Orville, a new TV series that on the surface is a sendup of the original Star Trek. Not many episodes into the series, it started going current-culture-critique big time. There’s a planet on which everyone rates everyone else’s behavior all the time, in person and on videos posted by other people. Too many pans and one can end up a jobless pariah or even re-educated. In another episode, an all-male species performs sex-change operations on the !% of babies that are born female in the assumption that those would be outcasts, until they discover their most favorite native poet is a reclusive female, which causes an uproar. In both cases, the resolution is not entirely what one would expect. Basically, if you have a weakness for sci-fi and thought the Book of Mormon was funny you should try this, and if not, don’t.

I especially like these shows because they are all complex treatments that challenge  and expand one’s world view. They spark discussion, even between a long-married couple. Perhaps it’s wimpy, but I find them more palatable and hopeful than the non-fiction analyses surrounding us. Like the December, 2017 issue of The Atlantic, which is soooo depressing.