Suddenly Last Summer

Composer: Courtney Bryan
Librettist: Daniel Fish, Gideon Lester
Company: Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College

Synopsis

A thrilling new opera based on Tennessee Williams’s fever-dream of a play about a family secret, and a mother’s desperate attempt to silence the truth. In this hybrid music-theater work, Courtney Bryan premieres a ravishing score inspired by the play’s two worlds: the Mediterranean coast and the Garden District of New Orleans, Bryan’s hometown. Director Daniel Fish, who staged Fisher Center LAB’s Tony Award-winning Oklahoma!, and Fisher Center Artistic Director and Chief Executive Gideon Lester have shaped a libretto from Williams’s tale of power, desire, and the lengths a family will go to protect its legacy. The poet Sebastian Venable died mysteriously in Spain last summer. His cousin Catharine—sung by SummerScape favorite Mikaela Bennett (Most Happy in Concert)—was with him and has since returned to New Orleans, where she obsessively recounts the story of his death. Now, Sebastian’s mother, played by renowned actor Tina Benko, is attempting to bribe a doctor to lobotomize her niece and cut the story from her memory forever. A world premiere and the first Fisher Center LAB Civis Hope Commission to premiere, this searing new opera brings radiant new life to Williams’s study of a confrontation between truth and power.