First a one-act play by famed playwright Tennessee Williams (1958), then a famous movie (1959), and now, finally, an opera composed by Courtney Bryan — a 2023 MacArthur Fellow. More precisely it is a theater piece created by Daniel Fish with an operatic obligato.
Judging from the look of its audience of a Sunday matinee the name recognition “Suddenly Last Summer” derived from the Katherine Hepburn / Elizabeth Taylor film directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz made sixty-seven or so years ago. Thus the story itself was well known to those of us feasting on the nostalgia for our college years — and what better place for this than on a college campus, in a Frank Gehry (same generation) designed theater complex, Bard College’s Fisher Center.
Luckily it is a well-known story because the “southern accent” of Mrs. Venable, played by actress Tina Benko, was laid on so thickly that it had to be understood musically rather than as spoken word, i.e. it was incomprehensible. Though, and more to the point, the performance itself was so slickly theatrical that it left composer Courtney Bryan’s music subservient to the performative arts in which we basked for the piece’s less-than-an-hour’s duration.
This Suddenly Last Summer was staged by Daniel Fish, known for Bard and the West End’s much lauded Oklahoma, who collaborated with Fisher Center’s director and Bard College professor Gideon Lester to create a libretto that would integrate the play’s words spoken by actors with the words sung by composer Courtney Bryan’s soprano, Catherine.
For those who did not see the movie, Catherine is Mrs. Venable’s niece who had accompanied Mrs. Venable’s homosexual son Sebastian on a trip to Spain where he had been cannabalized by a pack of starving boys. Mrs. Venable wants a local (New Orleans) brain surgeon to lobotomize Catherine to stop her from recounting the tale. Mrs. Venable’s nephew George wants Sebastian’s will to be quickly settled so that he can collect his bequest. Note that the Tennessee Williams plays are essentially biographical.
It’s all very 1950’s, think Benjamin Britten, Gian Carlo Menotti and Samuel Barber, Truman Capote, and especially Pier Paolo Pasolini. Et cetera.
Thus we had a pack of twelve boys (members of the Young People’s Chorus of New York City) who became, briefly, girls (long blond wigs, like Mrs. Venable) during a complexly staged musical interlude, one of whom, shedding his wig, made the sounds of a vulture eating its prey. Plus we had nephew George and his mother, Mrs. Holly, who only appeared pre-recorded in a giant, referentially black and white video projection. Not to mention the live visual artist, Lucy Tarquinio, who passed the opera’s duration, a vista, by swiping and dripping colors on multiple papers, to create the evolving images that were projected, actual, onto the back wall of the set.
The minimalist set, designed by Marsha Ginsberg, was a huge side wall and a huge back wall on a slanted, raised, raked black stage floor. The luxurious drawing room of Mrs. Venable’s New Orleans mansion was defined merely by a small, pale gray, corner projection of a door, fireplace and chair. The set itself became performative late in the opera, a section of the back wall rose slightly to reveal the pack of urchins, one of whom had previously rushed a spotlight back and forth across the stage to visually intensify Catherine’s dramatic revelations.
Catherine was sung by soprano Mikaela Bennett (lead photo left), well known for her participation in contemporary American opera — she sang the title role in the recent Hildegard in LA and NYC, and as well she played West Side Story’s Maria at Chicago’s Lyric Opera. Mlle. Bennett is a confident singer and performer able to pop off high notes at will, and able to soar gorgeously and convincingly in her initial vocalises — in composer Courtney Bryan’s score Catherine is limited to incoherent utterances until she finds the words to recite her tale in the opera’s final minutes. The theater piece then becomes, finally, compelling opera.
Actress Tina Benko’s spoken Mrs. Venable was indeed larger than life. If her words were incomprehensible her body language was explicit indeed. Her delivery was filled with the willful force of a dominant, frighteningly sexual, overbearing maternal creature. She was well able to encompass the minimalism of the production in its operatic abstraction. Mme. Benko played Desdemona in Toni Morrison’s eponymous play, directed by Peter Sellers.
The brain surgeon Dr. Cukrowicz (aka Dr. Sugar), wittily, was black actor Branden Lindsay who was directed to be politely low key, with an unobtrusive, almost invisible neutral voice to deliver the play’s famed last line “I think we ought at least to consider the possibility that the girl’s story could be true” in absolute dead-cold, after-the-fact, incongruous and dismissively meaningless irony.
Television actress Miriam Silverman was cast as Mrs. Holly, Catherine and George’s mother. Actor Nick Westrate was George, both artists’ faces magnified a thousand fold to fill the frames of their pre-recorded, intense and intentionally filmic video recorded performances.
The participation of members of the Young People’s Chorus of New York City was only in the theater piece’s musical numbers, each boy becoming an impressive musical presence in the opera’s grandiose finale.
Where was Courtney Bryan’s music in all this, you may ask. Eleven instrumentalists were sequestered behind the set. The music itself disappeared into the intensity of the performances, be they spoken, sung or painted. The vocal lines and musical tones seconded the theatrics of this impressive Fisher Center LAB Civic Hope commission.
Additional creative credits include Nathan Koci as music director and supervisor, Teresa Wadden as costume designer and Stacey Derosier as lighting designer. There was a quite sizable production team listed in the digitally offered program. There was no program booklet.
Michael Milenski
Luma Theater at the Fisher Center, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, July 5, 2026
Photographs copyright Maria Baranova, courtesy of the Fisher Center