Interview: Director Kevin Newbury, Contemporary Opera and the World of FELLOW TRAVELERS

Although Kevin Newbury has directed operas by some of history's greatest composers--Donizetti and Bellini, Strauss and Mozart among them--he makes no bones about it: He prefers his composers to be living. (Librettists, too, of course)

In the last year or so, this has meant three big contemporary projects for Newbury. First, there was MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE by Kevin Puts and Mark Campbell, from the well-known Richard Condon thriller (which also inspired the even better-known film, starring Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury), at Minnesota Opera Theatre. Then came BEL CANTO by Jimmy Lopez and Nilo Cruz, based on Ann Patchett's best-seller, for the Lyric Opera of Chicago, which will be seen on PBS's Great Performances next year. Next on his agenda is the World Premiere, on June 17 at the Cincinnati Opera, of FELLOW TRAVELERS by Gregory Spears and Greg Pierce, inspired by Thomas Mallon's novel of the same name.

All three have a political edge to them. MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, for example, is set in the aftermath of the Korean War and deals with brainwashing, while, in BEL CANTO, terrorists take over an embassy in South America. FELLOW TRAVELERS deals with the "Lavender Scare"--a witch hunt and mass firings of homosexual government employees in the 1950s during, and parallel to, Joe McCarthy's anti-Communist campaign.

Newbury, a Maine native, was drawn into the world of contemporary music when he came to work at City Opera in New York in 2000. Taking advantage of all the culture the city had to offer, from City Opera (with its history of staging new works) to Carnegie Hall, from Broadway to BAM's New Wave Festival, he became "hooked." His big shift into directing had a similar arc, first assisting on a production of John Adams's NIXON IN CHINA with Jim Robinson at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis and then going on to stage the work himself in several cities, including Cincinnati, where FELLOW TRAVELERS has been developed.

While the past year's trio of new operas are all near and dear to him, FELLOW TRAVELERS holds a special place. He was turned on to the novel by his friend Sterling Zinsmeyer, who not only though it would make a good opera, but commissioned it--and Newbury was there from the start.

Is opera really an ideal form for exploring these politically traumatic, current events kinds of subjects? "Absolutely," says Newbury. "I think audiences are really craving material that engages in being alive in the 21st century--especially things like BEL CANTO, FELLOW TRAVELERS and THE (R)EVOLUTION OF STEVE JOBS [by Mason Bates and Mark Campbell, which Newbury directs next year at the Santa Fe Opera] that are based on real events and real people."

"The Lavender Scare was the biggest witch hunt in American history--even bigger than the Red Scare--and people don't really know about it," he avers. "Very few people I've talked to--even fellow gay men and people who lived through it--realize how many gay men and women lost their jobs, and in some cases their lives, because of it."

FELLOW TRAVELERS takes place in 1950s Washington, D.C., at the height of McCarthyism. A recent college grad, Tim Laughlin, is eager to join the crusade against communism and has a chance encounter with a handsome State Department official Hawkins ("Hawk") Fuller. This leads to Tim's first job--and his first love affair with a man. (The third major character is Mary Johnson, Hawk's assistant and soon Tim's close friend.) Drawn into a maelstrom of deceit, Tim struggles to reconcile his political convictions and his forbidden love for Fuller-an entanglement that will end in a stunning act of betrayal.

While politics--sexual and otherwise--is at the heart of FELLOW TRAVELERS, it's not simply a political piece any more than TOSCA is. (Remember, Cavaradossi is arrested, and ultimately executed, for his Roman republic sympathies during the Napoleonic era.) Composer Gregory Spears has said, "What drew us to FELLOW TRAVELERS as a project is that it contains all the classic themes of opera: love, deception and betrayal, along with the political intrigue."

As the project began to take form, Newbury's first job was coming up with the writing team, "the two Gregs," as he frequently refers to them. "I would say that was my biggest contribution and I'm very proud of the choices that we made. Greg Pierce had never written a libretto before, though he had written a lot of very successful plays." (His play, HER REQUIEM, about a teenager who takes her senior year off from high school to write a mass, was at Lincoln Center's Tow Theatre this winter.) "Greg Spears and I have done three operas together and are a wonderful team. I knew they'd be a good match."

"We all sat down and talked about why the story was important and how we wanted to approach it," he recalls. "I like to give the writers space to approach the material but also to be a resource when they need me. Let me be clear: I don't write a single word--I'm not a writer--but the opera was certainly all structured as a team so it would work as a piece of theatre, which I think it does quite beautifully.

"Because it is based on a novel, one of the first parts of our conversation was what we wanted to take from it. Yes, the heart of the novel is the heart of the operas as well, but it's a completely different art form." He continues, "While it's wonderful that Mallon's work is so politically engaged, if we included ten senators and McCarthy era political figures, it would be hard to focus in on the trio--Tim, Hawk and Mary--at the center of our story.

"The novel shifts between the public, the private and the political. We had to streamline the politics to add more time to the human story." Indeed, there's only one moment in the opera that is kind of invented from whole cloth, says Newbury, and that's Hawk's aria at the end, which was a late addition. He notes, "We wanted to make him more sympathetic and also to get under his skin a little bit more. That's something you can only do in opera.

"As is usually the case in contemporary opera, the libretto came first and we talked about how to structure the story, figuring out which scenes would overlap, where the arias could go," he adds. "While Greg (Pierce) is a well-known playwright, structuring a libretto is a different animal because you have to leave room for the music to tell the story as well." (Early discussions also centered on which and how many characters to use, because we needed it to have a manageable sized cast, says the director, since economics is definitely part of the equation in the opera world.)

"For me, it was key to inspire the two Gregs' instincts to go in a very dramatically interesting direction. I really encouraged them to think of new ways of telling the story so it wasn't just, like, Scene One, Scene Two, aria, duet. I also helped them figure out what ensembles would be," he recalls. "For example, I suggested that they really embrace split scenes--for example, there's a scene where Hawk is telling Mary about what he's just done and she goes to tell Tim what happened, as Hawk goes to publically 'name his name.'

"I love what's been done with the storytelling, because it covers several years, in many locations and there's a real theatricality to it that is so exciting to me. And, honestly, the Gregs have really good instincts, so a big part of my job was just giving them feedback on what they were sending me. By the time we got to the workshop stage, in November 2013, it was one of the best working experiences I've ever had," he recalls. "We had 10 days with a group of very smart, great, talented singers in Cincinnati. And every night, we would sit down and talk about what was working, making judicious cuts where the voices were overlapping too much and letting the information come through."

But the team's work was far from finished. "We kept working on it. Even when we did our preview of some sections in March of this year (at National Sawdust in Brooklyn), we went back to the drawing board and completely redid Tim's scene in the church to make it more specific."

For Newbury, "It's all about collaboration--and the best idea wins. I love when you get to the opening and you lose track of what idea came from where. And that's very much the case with FELLOW TRAVELERS."

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