Flowers From the Cotton Fields

The most startling moment in “Zinnias: The Life of Clementine Hunter,” a genial new opera conceived, directed and designed by Robert Wilson, comes near the beginning.

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A young woman wearing a boldly patterned dress emerges from a door-shaped opening in a brightly painted curtain. She grins widely. “I’m Clementine Hunter,” she exclaims.

As a “life of” piece, “Zinnias,” which opened on Saturday as part of the Peak Performances series at Montclair State University, is a throwback to Mr. Wilson’s early years. He made his name in the 1960s and ’70s with a series of slow, sprawling abstractions posing as biographies: “The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud,” “The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin,” “Edison” and of course, “Einstein on the Beach,” his epochal collaboration with Philip Glass.

The ostensible subjects of those frequently mystifying pieces would never stoop to something as conventional as introducing themselves. Einstein does a lot of violin playing but says nothing throughout a five-hour opera.

So the forthright enthusiasm of Mr. Wilson’s Clementine Hunter, in real life a black plantation worker in Louisiana who achieved renown as a self-taught painter, comes as something of a shock. Mr. Wilson has made “Zinnias” recognizably his own while working with a sweetly easygoing score by Bernice Johnson Reagon, a founder of the a cappella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock, and Toshi Reagon, her daughter; and a book by Jacqueline Woodson. Its colored-light backdrops, elegant white furniture and angular, repetitive gestures will be familiar to his fans.

Unfamiliar though is the 90-minute opera’s sunny straightforwardness, a clarity that occasionally feels excessive. When a character recited the cloying line, “Clementine, you’ve got to share your colors with the world,” I found myself longing, as I never before had during a Wilson production, for a little more abstraction.

Hunter was born in late 1886 or early 1887 and died on New Year’s Day 1988. The opera skips lightly over this vast span, touching on her early work in Melrose Plantation’s cotton fields and the beginnings of her painting career, encouraged by the plantation’s artistically minded owner.

Turning out prodigious quantities of happily colored, unremittingly nostalgic portraits of plantation life and flowers, especially the zinnias of the title, Hunter gets her first exhibition in a segregated building at Northwestern State University in Louisiana that she is not allowed to enter for the opening. She begins to sell her work and is acclaimed for it, eventually receiving an honorary degree from Northwestern State.

This inspiring story is told through unpretentious, fluent songs that are amalgams of folk, rockabilly and gospel performed with gorgeously full-throated gusto by a talented cast of 10. In one memorable scene just a few performers on a bare stage, armed with the show’s swinging six-person band and Millicent Johnnie’s unassuming yet sharp choreography, conjured the sweaty delirium of a Saturday-night dance.

The show has a firm anchor in Carla Duren’s Clementine, a potent combination of vulnerability and strength in both voice and gesture. She saves her honorary-degree moment from syrupy sentimentality with the fierce focus of her grip on the diploma.

But that sequence, capped with teary repetitions of “thank you,” feels not so much illuminating as routine, like checking off a biographical box, the problem with many of the scenes in “Zinnias.” Too often the show takes on the cheerful didacticism of a children’s book, with pat lines like, “That’s how it is in the segregated South,” offered when Hunter is not permitted to attend her opening. Neither an alluring song about the sinking of the Titanic nor that Saturday dance party advance the story quite so clearly, but they convey the vibrancy of Hunter’s paintings more evocatively.

If artistically “Zinnias” is an amiable blip in Mr. Wilson’s output, it evidently carries personal meaning for him: He met Hunter as a child and collects her work. He has lavished on her story the production’s strangest element, a solemn undertow in the imposing person of Sheryl Sutton.

A veteran of Mr. Wilson’s early works, Ms. Sutton is billed here as the silent Angel, gliding darkly on the edges of scenes. She spends “Zinnias” in a funereal 19th-century-style black dress, much like the one she wore in Mr. Wilson’s 1971 breakthrough, “Deafman Glance.”

Arm slightly raised in an enigmatic gesture, she sits for long minutes in the downstage left corner, the same spot in which she sat, arms slightly raised in an enigmatic gesture, for much of “Einstein on the Beach.” At one point she pours water into a glass until it overflows and runs off a table. I don’t know what that moment means, but it had a terrifying sobriety that contrasted with the jauntiness of the rest of “Zinnias.”

In a recent interview in The New York Times, Mr. Wilson observed of Broadway style, “It’s all in the one-liners — you have to get it and react. This thing” — “Zinnias” — “is different because you can get lost. And it’s O.K. to get lost.”

Contrasting his new work with Broadway productions, Mr. Wilson misses the point. Bright, charming and tuneful, “Zinnias” is perhaps the first of his productions that could be happy there.