The Tonya and Nancy soap opera, minus the soap

MEDFORD, Mass. --When Tufts music student Abigail Al-Doory sought operatic inspiration, she looked not to the classics like Wagner's "Ring" cycle but to the Olympic rings, where themes like power, envy and greed are also in plentiful supply.

In "Tonya and Nancy: The Opera," Al-Doory provides 18 movements on the scandal that turned the once-dainty sport of figure skating into a soap opera of whacking, wailing and jail. Scheduled for two performances on Tuesday night, the verismo production portrays the skaters not as rivals but more as a pair, singing for the audience's sympathy as the tawdry affair unfolds.

"I think they had a lot in common, which is what we wanted to draw out in the opera," said Al-Doory, who composed the music to complete her masters degree. "They both figured out they had to reclaim their identities. It's a note of hope."

More Peggy Fleming than Renee Fleming, "Tonya and Nancy" follows the lines of "Jerry Springer -- The Opera," a London hit based on the equally lowbrow world of daytime talk TV. Al-Doory takes the well-known rivalry between the skaters and recasts it as one in which they both struggle to overcome personal troubles and public perception.

"We, as a society, allowed this to happen to two young girls. They're building up their entire lives for this moment. And who are they after that?" Al-Doory said. "It can't help being absurd and funny because of the situation. But it's serious.

"I really believe in the story. We're not just making fun of people. This isn't a parody."

Even so, she'll have a hard time selling a ticket to Kerrigan, who said Monday she'd been aware of the production but wasn't planning to attend.

"I lived it," the skater said. "What do I need to watch it for?"

She'll miss Margaret Hunter (Nancy) and Kristen Sergeant (Tonya) open with dueling news conferences before the action flashes back to the knee-whacking and follows them through the Olympic skateoff to their futures. Nancy becomes a wife and mother; Tonya an ex-wife and one tough mother.

Banned from skating, Harding joins the Faustian freak show that is women's boxing.

"The difference is you have to have the balls to punch the other girl in the face," Harding sings. "The difference is you don't get in trouble for hitting her."

That this is "Tonya and Nancy," and not the other way around, is no accident. Only in opera -- or its schlockier, soapier offspring -- would a convicted Olympic also-ran get top billing over a squeaky-clean silver medalist.

"She is the more fascinating character. And, also, it sounds better to me," librettist Elizabeth Searle said at rehearsal last weekend. "I don't think there's any way to look at Tonya's history and not feel some degree of sympathy. As a writer, I feel huge sympathy for her.

"And I love her as a character."

Harding never leaves the stage during the 40-minute production, which will be performed twice on Tuesday night near Harvard Square. Breaking from the made-for-TV mold, though, she is not put on display for mockery or scorn.

The opera is a brutal expose on Harding's home life, showing her as a victim of maternal and spousal abuse. You see her breakdown, perhaps contrived, as she warbles, "The lace is broke!" But you also see her face contort into real fear when her duet with husband Jeff Gillooly twists into a wife-beating tango.

"Yes, I'd always rather play the villain," said Sergeant, whose only skating experience came in childhood hockey. "Wouldn't everyone?"

Kerrigan also comes away tarnished. But every "Why me?" has an answer of "Why her?"

Nancy sings, "My mom is legally blind." Tonya: "My mom is legally nuts."

The casting makes the point, too: Jennifer Hazel plays both skaters' mothers, taking the same cartoonish hairbrush she used to stroke Nancy's brunette locks and using it to beat Harding for missing the medal stand at the Olympics.

But Nancy is no more satisfied.

"Silver?" she repeats joylessly after finishing second.

"We're definitely sympathetic to both. I'm sure we're also unsympathetic to both," Al-Doory said. "It's a pretty bald look at both of them based on headlines and stuff they said in real life."

The costumes, the choreography, the scripted outcomes -- what's the big difference, anyway, between opera and figure skating?

Verdi had his elephants; Al-Doory has Stant, the bodybuilder and Navy Seal reject hired to knee-club Kerrigan at the 1994 Olympic trials and clear Harding's path to Lillehammer. Gillooly planned the attack to incapacitate his wife's top rival, but it turned her into a pariah and made Kerrigan even more of an American sweetheart.

Armen Nercessian (Stant) played the knee-whacking as vaudevillian comedy, dancing a soft-shoe with the collapsible baton in the place of a white-tipped cane that Fred Astaire might have used. "Maybe play with it like a penis?" he asked during rehearsal, and indeed he does before slamming into the stage to shock the scene back into tragedy.

Once the audience sees the club is for real, Stant surreptitiously swaps it with a foam one that will allow him to whack Kerrigan without holding back. Hunter, like Kerrigan before her, was surprised at how much it hurt.

"We didn't play the knee attack for laughs," Searle said.

The music is filled with dark notes, flats and sharps, tones that would signal the entrance of Simon Barsinister, a great big shark or at least the legendary villain Scarpia from Puccini's Tosca. Three basses from the chorus drone, "Gillooly colluded." When Kerrigan takes center stage, the music turns soft and fuzzy.

The chorus has its own leitmotif: banging pianos to represent the clattering typewriters of the newspapermen who flit from Tony and Nancy (and only briefly to Oksana Baiul, who actually won the gold medal in Lillehammer). The chorus also stands in for the skating judges who make Kerrigan's 5.9's and Harding's 5.5's into a Gregorian chant.

"There's something about the story that just calls to me," said Searle, who is Al-Doory's aunt and already the author of one well-received novella about the skating scandal. "It's dark and gloomy and absurd, but at the same time I was kind of moved by it."

It was Searle who was the Nancy and Tonya junkie back in '94, collecting newspaper clips and taking notes as she watched Entertainment Tonight in the months before the Lillehammer Games. "I didn't know how I would use it," she said.

"This one was mine," she said as she leaned forward in her chair, her eyes getting wider. "I didn't like O.J. I didn't like the story. These scandals are like our folklore. They're our shared wisdom."

About 80 percent of the libretto, or script, was taken from actual dialogue or newspaper headlines or the actual scores the skaters received in Lillehammer. Searle said she made the other 20 percent up to hold the plot together.

"We're really trying to tell a story, not rehash the whole thing," Al-Doory said.

In the most obvious example, Kerrigan shrieks the apocryphal "Why me?" instead of her actual, "Why? Why?" When faced with the choice of sticking to the real story or moving the opera along, director Meron Langsner said he chose art every time.

"It's not entirely documentary truth. I wouldn't think that's interesting," he said. "To limit these actors, these talented women, to have them impersonate people who do their best expression when they're figure skating, that's limiting what they can do."

Al-Doory's goal is to make the viewers rethink their impression of Harding and Kerrigan, maybe send them away with a tune in their heads.

If she fails, Nancy won't be the only one wondering, "Why me?"

"Our adviser encouraged us to do a string quartet. I wanted to do something with voice and a story," Al-Doory said, 72 hours before the performance. "I really should have done a string quartet."