Schroon Lake’s new opera features romance during anti-gay Lavender Scare – North Country Public Radio
Aug 04, 2022 —
A lot of us are familiar with Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s driving the “Red Scare” over communists in the US. The current opera at the Seagle Festival is about another panic that happened at the time.
The Lavender Scare of the 20th-century was part of McCarthy’s witchunt to rid the US government of people who were LGBTQ. He accused them of being threats, communist sympathizers and morally weak, which resulted in a mass dismissal from government service.
“What many people may not know about the Lavender Scare is where gay people were outed or even people suspected of being homosexual were outed. Some of these men were married and many of them committed suicide,” said Darren Woods, the creative director at the Seagle Festival.
“It was a really dark time.”
Seagle Festival is performing the new American opera, Fellow Travelers, which takes place during this panic.
Buy tickets to “Fellow Travelers” and other productions from the Seagle Festival here!
The characters Tim and Hawk in “Fellow Travelers.” Photo courtesy of Seagle Festival.
“In the story, a young man comes to Washington after he’s finished graduate school and he gets a job at a newspaper and he’s in a park and he’s going to go to Roy Cohn’s wedding, who worked for McCarthy and we all know that he was gay and was married, so he’s covering it. And a man who works in the state department sits down next to him on the bench and talks to him.”
Pretty soon, they start a very closeted love affair.
Long story short, the younger man wants the relationship to be something that’s very much like our marriage of today and the older man realizes that that can’t be.
So, he betrays him, exposing him to that Lavender Scare.
“It’s just a really good look when so many of the personal and private rights that we enjoy today are always threatened.”
Fellow Travelers first premiered just five years ago. This weekend’s showing at the Seagle Festival is only about the 20th production of the piece.
Darren Woods. Photo by Monica Sandreczki
Woods has always loved performing and premiering new works like this – from his early career as a performer at the Santa Fe Opera to directing the Fort Worth Opera.
“The young composers have started calling me the grandfather of the American opera scene because I really started back in Fort Worth. It’s just been a passion of mine.”
Now, as the artistic director at one of the country’s premier opera training programs in the Southern Adirondacks, he’s gotten to be a part of the Seagle’s efforts to produce new works. The try to perform a new American work every year. Last year, they performed an opera commissioned from the Adirondacks’ Pulitzer Prize winning author, Russell Banks.
The best part, for Woods, is finding new voices of librettists composers he thinks are important and need to be heard.
Woods has followed Fellow Travelers since it’s very earliest conception.
“I know Greg Spears, the composer, and Greg Pierce, the librettist, and I remember seeing this when it was just an idea and not a note had been written. They were at an OPERA America Conference and they were talking about it and I was like, ‘that sounds interesting’.
“Then I saw the first workshops and a few scenes. And I feel like, although I wasn’t really a part of it, that I’ve been sort of an observer since it went from nothing, to this beautiful piece of music.”
Photos courtesy of Seagle Festival.
“When I first saw this performed four years ago, I was like, ‘I want to do it’ and I was sitting next to my director Richard Kagey who’s directing it was show and he said, ‘I have to direct this show. I have to direct this show.'”
It moved them. Woods wanted his performers to have the chance to talk with this living composer and librettist to understand how they envisioned the story performed.
To Woods, “Fellow Travelers” is an incredibly important piece.
“This one just spoke to me so much. And again, as things are happening politically, I… it’s not a piece of the 1950s. It’s very much a piece of the 21st century.”