FISHER CENTER LAB
Fisher Center LAB Civis Hope Commission/World Premiere
Music by Courtney Bryan
Libretto by Gideon Lester and Daniel Fish based on the play by Tennessee Williams
Directed by Daniel Fish
Music Direction and Supervision by Nathan Koci
June 25 – July 19
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.
A co-production with Opera Philadelphia.
Presented by special arrangement with The University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee.
Catharine Holly
Mrs. Venable
Choral Ensemble
Additional casting to be announced this spring.
Scenic Design Marsha Ginsberg
Costume Design Terese Wadden
Lighting Design Stacey Derossier
Projection Design Joshua Thorson
Producer Carter Edwards
Casting Taylor Williams, CSA
Associate Direction Mikhaela Mahony
Stage Management Jason Kaiser
“My creative work as a composer traverses multiple musical genres, focusing on bridging the sacred and the secular, exploring human emotions through sound, and confronting the challenge of notating the feeling of improvisation. During my appointment as composer-in-residence with Opera Philadelphia, I have been exploring the art of opera writing.
The first 20th-century opera I saw, while still in high school, was André Previn and Philip Littell’s setting of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, and it left a lasting impression, seeing how opera with contemporary language could complement the storytelling of such a powerful play. I am drawn to the complex worlds that Williams creates and look forward to writing music that draws upon the beauty and terror in this Southern Gothic story. The setting of the play in my city of New Orleans and the various themes of wealth and power, of sexuality and vulnerability, and the blurring of reality and fiction and of sanity and insanity are compelling to me. In particular, I look forward to musically bringing out the imagined state of the two contrasting women characters, Mrs. Violet Venable and her niece, Catharine Holly.” —Courtney Bryan
Courtney Bryan is a Steinway Artist and 2023 MacArthur Fellow, who currently serves as composer-in-residence with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra.
Recent works include DREAMING (Freedom Sounds), performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble at New York’s Kaufman Music Center; Visual Rhythms, a new art-inspired orchestral piece for Jacksonville Symphony; House of Pianos, which Bryan premiered in 2023 with the LA Phil New Music Group (chamber ensemble version) and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (full orchestra version); and Gathering Song (libretto by Tazewell Thompson), composed for bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green and the New York Philharmonic.
Bryan’s compositions have been performed by Opera Philadelphia (Composer in Residence, 2022–2024), the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra (Creative Partner, 2020–2023), Jacksonville Symphony (Mary Carr Patton Composer-In-Residence, 2018–2020), London Sinfonietta, LA Phil, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, and Chicago Sinfonietta in a wide range of renowned venues, including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walt Disney Concert Hall, and Blue Note Jazz Club.
Recent accolades include the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts (2018), Samuel Barber Rome Prize in Music Composition (2019–2020), United States Artists Fellowship (2020), and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship (2020–2021). She is the Albert and Linda Mintz Professor of Music at Newcomb College in the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane University. Her music is published by Boosey & Hawkes.
Daniel Fish is a New York-based director who makes work across the boundaries of theater, film, and opera. He draws on a broad range of forms and subject matter, including plays, film scripts, contemporary fiction, essays, and found audio. His acclaimed 2019 production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! transferred to Broadway from St. Ann’s Warehouse, following its premiere at the Fisher Center at Bard, and won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical. The production then transferred to London’s West End, where it won the Olivier Award for Best Musical Revival. Other recent work includes White Noise, inspired by the novel by Don DeLillo (Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen, Theater Freiburg, NYU Skirball Center), Michael Gordon’s opera Acquanetta (Prototype, and also a Fisher Center premiere), Who Left This Fork Here (Baryshnikov Arts Center, Onassis Stegi), Ted Hearne’s The Source (BAM Next Wave, LA Opera, San Francisco Opera).
His work has been seen at theaters and festivals throughout the U.S. and Europe, including the Walker Art Center, PuSh, Teatro Nacional D. Maria II, Lisbon & Estoril Film Festival, Vooruit, Festival TransAmériques, Noorderzon Festival, The Chocolate Factory Theater, The Public Theater’s Under The Radar, Opera Philadelphia/Curtis Opera Theatre, American Repertory Theater, Yale Repertory Theatre, McCarter Theatre, Signature Theatre, The Shakespeare Theater Company, Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, Staatstheater Braunschweig, and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Residencies and commissions include MacDowell, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Mass MoCA, The Chocolate Factory Theater, and LMCC/Governors Island.
He is a graduate of Northwestern University’s Department of Performance Studies and has taught at The Juilliard School, Bard College, Princeton University, and the Department of Design for Stage and Film at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. He is the recipient of the 2017 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts for the Theater, as well as an Obie Award and a Tony nomination.
Gideon Lester is Artistic Director and Chief Executive of the Fisher Center at Bard. As a writer for the stage, his translations include Moliere’s Dom Juan, The Island of Slaves and The Dispute by Marivaux, Büchner’s Woyzeck, and Brecht’s Mother Courage & Her Children, and his adaptations include Kafka’s Amerika, Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, and Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.
A Tony and Olivier Award-winning creative producer, festival director, and dramaturg, he has collaborated with and commissioned a broad range of American and international artists across disciplines, including Romeo Castellucci, Justin Vivian Bond, Tania El Khoury, Brice Marden, Sarah Michelson, Claudia Rankine, Kaija Saariaho, Peter Sellars, and Anna Deavere Smith.
Recent projects include the world premiere of Sufjan Stevens, Justin Peck, and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Illinoise (Tony Award); Common Ground, an international festival on the politics of land and food; Daniel Fish’s Oklahoma! (Tony Award; Olivier Award); Pam Tanowitz’s Four Quartets and Song of Songs; Ronald K. Brown and Meshell Ndegeocello’s Grace and Mercy; and Peter Sellars’s film This body is so impermanent… Productions he has developed and commissioned have toured to theaters and art centers around the world, including BAM (Brooklyn); Circle in the Square (Broadway); CAP UCLA (Los Angeles); Lincoln Center; St Ann’s Warehouse (Brooklyn); New York City Center; Barbican (London); Walker Art Center (Minneapolis); Spielart (Munich); Onassis Stegi (Athens); Edinburgh International Festival; and many others.
Commissioning support for Suddenly Last Summer was provided by the Howard & Sarah D. Solomon Foundation. The commissioning of Courtney Bryan received funding from OPERA America’s Opera Grants for Women Composers program, supported by the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation. Suddenly Last Summer was developed with residency support from the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM).
Fisher Center LAB is funded by the Lucille Lortel Foundation and the Fisher Center’s Artistic Innovation Fund, with lead support from Rebecca Gold Milikowsky and additional funding from The William and Lia G. Poorvu Family Foundation. Major development support for Suddenly Last Summer has been received from the Fisher Center’s Hope Commissions Fund, generously endowed by the Civis Foundation and Bard College.
Nearby villages and towns in the Hudson Valley boast a large selection of restaurants, as well as a variety of hotels, motels, inns, and bed & breakfasts.
Eat & StayBard College’s main campus is located in Annandale-on-Hudson (a hamlet of Red Hook), New York, on the east bank of the Hudson River, about 90 miles north of New York City and 220 miles southwest of Boston. The Taconic State Parkway and the New York State Thruway provide the most direct routes to our campus. Click the Google map below, or get directions by entering the following address into your GPS: 60 Manor Avenue, Red Hook, NY 12571.
From the East
If you are traveling from east of the Hudson River in New York State, take the Taconic State Parkway to the Red Hook / Route 199 exit, drive west on Route 199 through the village of Red Hook to Route 9G, turn right onto Route 9G, drive north 1.9 miles, turn left onto Annandale Road, then turn right onto Manor Ave.
From the West
If you are traveling from west of the Hudson River, take the New York State Thruway (I-87) to exit 19 (Kingston), take Route 209 (changes to Route 199 at the Hudson River) over the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge to Route 9G, turn left onto Route 9G, drive north 3.5 miles, turn left onto Annandale Road, then turn right onto Manor Ave.
LUMA Theater
Accessible Seating
Wheelchair-accessible seating is available at all performances. Due to the flexible nature of this performance space, wheelchair seating varies for each production.
Wheelchair-Accessible Restrooms
Restrooms at all locations are wheelchair accessible. Single-use restrooms are available at most locations.
All-Gender Restrooms
Bard College and the Fisher Center support guests of any gender identity/expression in using the restroom of their choice. Additionally, all-gender restrooms are available at all venues.
Find answers to some of the most common questions patrons have regarding our venues and performances. If you have a question not answered in our FAQs, please call 845-758-7900 or email [email protected] during regular Box Office hours.
Our “Know Before You Go” guide answers all of your pre-show accessibility and navigation questions for your next performance at the Fisher Center!
