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Thirteen years have passed since Danny Chen, an Army private from New York, killed himself<\/a> while serving in Afghanistan after experiencing brutal hazing and racist taunts<\/a> from fellow soldiers. \u201cAn American Soldier,\u201d the opera based on his story<\/a>, has been seen in Washington, D.C., and St. Louis.<\/p>\n But when the work had its run in Missouri<\/a>, in 2018, Huang Ruo, its composer, and David Henry Hwang, its librettist, promised Private Chen\u2019s family that they would try to bring it home to the city where he was born and raised. This week, they succeeded, as \u201cAn American Soldier\u201d was produced at the Perelman Performing Arts Center<\/a> at the World Trade Center \u2014 just a mile or so from Chinatown, where Private Chen grew up and where a stretch of Elizabeth Street was renamed<\/a> Private Danny Chen Way in 2014.<\/p>\n In Chay Yew\u2019s clearheaded production, with an excellent cast, the touching opera had little trouble making its impact at the performance on Saturday evening. Huang and Hwang\u2019s piece is a straightforward Chinese American family drama, but one with obvious, shameful resonances about the treatment of Asian people and other minorities in this country, and the limits on American ideals of the embrace of difference and easy assimilation.<\/p>\n The piece opens on the court-martial of a brutal sergeant who was Private Chen\u2019s chief antagonist. It then alternates between the courtroom and the chronological unfolding of Private Chen\u2019s story, from the first glimmers of his idea to join the Army \u2014 an effort to prove that he was a \u201creal American\u201d \u2014 through the camaraderie of basic training, his endurance of racism at his next post and his nightmarish treatment once he reaches Afghanistan. His mother is a tender presence in her scenes at home with her beloved son, and a figure of fury and hurt during the court-martial, which resulted in the sergeant\u2019s being found not guilty<\/a> of the most serious charges.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The version of \u201cAn American Soldier\u201d that premiered at Washington National Opera in 2014 was a single act of just an hour. By 2018, at Opera Theater of Saint Louis, the piece had added an act and doubled in length, delving more deeply into Private Chen\u2019s life beyond the account of the sergeant\u2019s trial. With some tweaks, this is the work that was performed at the Perelman Center, in a version it commissioned with Boston Lyric Opera.<\/p>\n Whether calmly undulating under an impassioned duet or anxiously sputtering as the plot darkens, Huang\u2019s music \u2014 Carolyn Kuan conducted the American Composers Orchestra \u2014 tends to simmer out of the spotlight, allowing the storytelling to come to the fore. But there are some idiosyncratic touches in the score, like the almost ritualistic percussion hovering under some passages and the fractured trumpet, a kind of stifled fanfare, near the end, when there is an ironic choral paean to the American motto \u201cE pluribus unum\u201d (\u201cOut of many, one\u201d).<\/p>\n As with many contemporary operas, some trouble emerges from the libretto: Hwang\u2019s text is so stodgily prosy that it tends to drag the vocal lines into monotony. The feeling much of the time is of a spoken play that\u2019s being heatedly and somewhat awkwardly sung.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Daniel Ostling\u2019s set, starkly lit by Jeanette Yew, was an ominously blank white box, with the back wall a screen for projections that swiftly shifted scenes, allowing for quick changes from New York City rooftops to the mountains of Afghanistan. Linda Cho\u2019s costumes were simple and effective.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The tenor Brian Vu easily held the stage as Danny with his focused, transparent voice, unstrained even in the high notes that express the extremity of the character\u2019s situation. His performance was sympathetic but unsentimental; Vu made clear Danny\u2019s teenage braggadocio alongside his abundant charm, as well as his quietly mounting desperation.<\/p>\n Hannah Cho\u2019s lucid soprano soared alongside him as Josephine, Danny\u2019s friend \u2014 and maybe more \u2014 in New York. (While the drama\u2019s focus is on the mother-son relationship, at the Perelman Center the more powerful connection was this budding, tragically curtailed romance.)<\/p>\n Nina Yoshida Nelsen, her mezzo-soprano mellow, stuttered with rage and softly sang lullabies as Mother Chen. The baritone Alex DeSocio was a boomingly hateful presence as the racist, sadistic sergeant. The bass-baritone Christian Simmons, playing characters including a military judge and Danny\u2019s fellow soldier, was a rich-toned standout amid a generally strong six-person supporting ensemble.<\/p>\n Good and bad are drawn in \u201cAn American Soldier\u201d with old-fashioned plainness \u2014 and, indeed, for all its contemporary subject matter, the opera embraces traditional conventions of the art form, with arias, duets, trios and even a drinking chorus, just like in \u201cOtello.\u201d<\/p>\n The work\u2019s connections to the standard repertory made it even sweeter that it was put on at all, at a time when full opera productions are ever rarer in New York. Just about the only venue for material like \u201cAn American Soldier\u201d has been the annual Prototype festival of contemporary music theater, so it is heartening to see the Perelman Center fill even a bit of the gap.<\/p>\n An American Soldier<\/strong><\/p>\n Performed at the Perelman Performing Arts Center, Manhattan; pacnyc.org.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n