SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER to Make World Premiere at Fisher Center at Bard

Fisher Center LAB will present the world premiere of 2023 MacArthur Fellow Courtney Bryan's Suddenly Last Summer, co-produced by Opera Philadelphia, June 25 – July 19 at the Fisher Center, as part of Bard Summerscape 2026.

The opera is composed by Bryan and features a libretto by Fisher Center Artistic Director and Chief Executive Gideon Lester and Tony-nominated director Daniel Fish, based on Tennessee Williams's seldom-performed tale of power, desire, and the lengths a family will go to protect its legacy. Also serving as stage director of this hybrid music-theater work, Fish returns to SummerScape for the production, having a decade ago rocked the festival—and, not long after, Broadway—with his acclaimed reimagining of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma!, on which he also collaborated with Suddenly Last Summer music director Nathan Koci. Suddenly Last Summer is the first presentation of one of the Fisher Center's three inaugural Fisher Center LAB Civis Hope Commissions.

Fisher Center LAB this year unites three visionaries in a work that applies the mythic emotional proportions of opera to Tennessee Williams's twisted psychological storytelling and blistering atmosphere. The opera tells the gripping and troubling story of the wealthy Venable family. The poet Sebastian Venable died mysteriously in Spain last summer. His cousin Catherine—sung by SummerScape favorite Mikaela Bennett (SummerScape: Daniel Fish's Most Happy in Concert; also with Fish: Acquanetta)—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 (Broadway: The Rose Tattoo; Off-Broadway: A Midsummer Night's Dream), is attempting to bribe a certain Dr. Cukrowicz, played by Branden Lindsay (Off-Broadway: Merry Wives; Film: Train Dreams), to lobotomize her niece and cut the story from her memory forever. The Young People's Chorus of New York City joins the production as its choral ensemble.

Beyond Bennett, Benko, Lindsay, and Members of the Young People's Chorus of New York, the production features, on video, Tony Award winner Miriam Silverman (Broadway: The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, Junk) as Mrs. Holly, Nick Westrate (Broadway: Bernhardt/Hamlet, Casa Valentina) as George. The creative team is Nathan Koci (Music Direction and Supervision), Marsha Ginsberg (Scenic Design), Terese Wadden (Costume Design), Stacey Derosier (Lighting Design), Garth MacAleavey (Audio Design and Mixing), Joshua Thorson (Projection Design), Beth Gill (Movement Direction), Bobbie Zlotnik (Hair and Wig Design), Anne Ford-Coates (Makeup Design), Carter Edwards (Producer), Taylor Williams, CSA (Casting), Mikhaela Mahony (Associate Direction), Thomas Keith (Literary Consultant), and Jason Kaiser (Stage Management).

This new take on a lesser-known yet unforgettable work by Williams originated when Fish sent a copy to Lester. On re-reading the play, Lester felt it “had to be sung.” He explains, “As I read the poetry of Williams's scenes, I thought, ‘this has an opera in it because it's gothic; it's fabulously intense, emotionally, and its language soars.' Opera, of course, is a form that gives itself to heightened passions, to great drama, to singing what really can't be spoken. We think of Williams's most famous plays, set in New Orleans and the South, as being representations of real life, but they go far beyond that into the realms of the imagination and the unconscious. Suddenly Last Summer is perhaps the most extreme and glorious example of that. I'd been thinking for some time about approaching the great composer Courtney Bryan to see whether she might want to take her first foray into theater with music. I sent her the play, and I think she was really captivated by it.”

Lester describes the work as “total theater—the intersection of design and music and performance and passion and spoken word.” Bryan then brought her own musical spirit, grounded in the musical traditions of New Orleans, to the interplay between her and Williams's sensibilities, and sung and spoken drama. To capture the two worlds the play surrounds—the Mediterranean coast and the Garden District of New Orleans—and the ways they act on and build the story, Bryan spent time composing in both locales, including a research visit to her hometown with Lester and Fish. Bryan now premieres her ravishing score inspired by those two environments.

Courtney Bryan, whose introduction to Fish's work was seeing Oklahoma! and who had been a student of Lester's at Columbia, said, “I took a collaboration course with Gideon. It's nice that years later, we're collaborating on a professional project. It's interesting to think about a different side of New Orleans than where I grew up, one that I'm only familiar with from the outside; these characters lived in houses in the Garden District of New Orleans that were always a mystery to me. The project has allowed me to think differently about harmony, to get into the emotions behind the characters and the story, and capture the extreme moods of the piece. That was a big part of my draw to the project.”

Daniel Fish said, “Tennessee Williams is writing about violence in American life. There's one woman who has a burning need to tell the truth, and another woman who has another, more insidious need to silence that truth. It's a crazy, gothic, melodramatic story that is really deeply connected to those themes that Williams was always exploring. And what happens when we put Tennessee Williams's language, Courtney Bryan's music, Mikaela Bennett's voice, Tina Benko and Branden Lindsay's acting, all of this together in one space, in one particular time? That's what I'm interested in.”

Knowing Mikaela Bennett would be performing the role of Catherine—the one principal character who sings, while the others speak—Bryan wrote specifically for her voice. Says Bennett, “I have never had the opportunity to work on something where all the creatives are in the room, working together from square one, and we get to mold the piece around us as artists. Courtney is leaning into what makes me special as an artist who has flexibility around genre. [And with Daniel], I feel really lucky working with a director whom I trust so much, and obviously trusts me as well. There's so much freedom and discovery in the room.”