Tennessee Williams’ one-act play Suddenly Last Summer poses a complex challenge to any creative interpreter. The Southern Gothic melodrama, set in the Garden District of New Orleans in 1936, is a tangled knot of repression, predation, collusion and even cannibalism, along with a forced lobotomy. It involves some of the most florid, poetic language in the Williams canon, and maintains a powerful commitment to symbolism.
All of which intrigued and captivated Courtney Bryan, the acclaimed composer and pianist, as she labored on an operatic version of Suddenly Last Summer. Working with Daniel Fish, an award-winning theater director, and Gideon Lester, who leads the Fisher Center at Bard, she created a new opera inspired by Williams’ hothouse drama — a co-commission by Fisher Center LAB, which presented its premiere this summer, and Opera Philadelphia, which hosts three performances this week (on Oct. 22, 23 and 25).
With a minimalist staging that includes abstract painting projected live on a scenic backdrop, this Suddenly Last Summer amplifies the moral ambiguity of Williams’ story. So too does the music: in his New York Times review, critic Joshua Barone praised “the smooth eclecticism, emotional immediacy and comparative modesty of Bryan’s score.”
“If the production doesn’t exactly conjure the sultriness of New Orleans, the music does,” Barone added. “Chords build one note at a time, like sunlight emerging from around a corner; melodies melt with downward glissandos, and Bennett similarly bends pitches, soulfully scooping her way into a note.”
I recently connected with Bryan to talk about her process of adapting the play, and writing music that captures its drama. Here is an edited transcript of our conversation.
How did you get connected with this Tennessee Williams play? And when it was presented to you, how intuitive did it feel to adapt?
It kind of goes to how long I've known Gideon Lester — since I was in grad school at Columbia, either my first or second year. I met him in that context, and soon after that, he got the position as artistic director at the Fisher Center at Bard. So I had already been in touch with Gideon, thinking about different kinds of theatrical or collaborative works to do. I had some ideas percolating while I was doing my composer residency with Opera Philadelphia, and during that time, Gideon reached out to me about this project. Daniel Fish had brought the play to Gideon, and it was Gideon’s idea that it should be an opera. They've worked together on so many successful projects, including the Oklahoma! revival on Broadway.
Right.
And knowing the New Orleans connection, I was definitely interested. Tennessee Williams is one of those people I know about because of how important he is as an American writer — and especially in New Orleans, there's just Tennessee Williams everything. My mother is a literature scholar who was involved with the Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival when I was growing up. But I wasn't a Tennessee Williams person outside of, like, A Streetcar Named Desire. So I was actually walking into it fresh: “Let me discover Tennessee Williams for myself.” I did wrestle with the story. I tend to like to be in difficult emotional spaces with my projects, but this was a little more grotesque and gothic. I just felt like the writing kept calling me back in.
As you said, this is a gothic story, it’s macabre, full of darkness and secrets and a desperation to keep things hidden. I wonder how that resonates for you with New Orleans. It's a city haunted by history, and I wonder how that connects for you with the themes in this play?
I always love your wording — because “haunted with history,” that's such a great description of the city. Also acknowledging ghosts and spirits existing together, because in New Orleans, you just feel it all the time. It's interesting that in this story, the main characters really represented a specific part of New Orleans, which is the Garden District. I think of the big houses on St. Charles Avenue, and it feels like that's its own world. I teach at Tulane, and I am in that part of Uptown working, but it's interesting to grow up in a city and feel like, “OK, this area is kind of a mystery, as far as the inner lives of people who live in those houses.”
Yeah.
There’s a house where Tennessee Williams actually wrote most of this play. It's on Louisiana Avenue off St. Charles. I’m friends with an artist, Horton Humble, who manages the house and does his art there. I just happened to run into him after not seeing him for a while, and he was like, “Courtney, you should come visit my studio. It's the house where Tennessee Williams wrote Suddenly Last Summer.” I was like: “No way! I'm writing an opera based on that.”
Wow. That feels almost cosmic.
It was one of those cosmic moments. When we did one of our early workshops with me, Gideon and Daniel, we met in New Orleans, and one of the things we did was visit the house together. It made a lot come alive, because in the descriptions Tennessee Williams wrote, you could tell how much the house was an inspiration. I had a chance later to go back in the house and just sit there and think about the music, and it helped just to be there. But I also went to Mississippi, where Tennnesse Williams is from. I felt like I had to be near the water. I had these drafts I had done, piano memos. I took those and walked around in the water and listened on my phone, and then it started to match different characters. So, there's a lot of being in certain places, because that worked for me in Mississippi and around New Orleans — and then I had an opportunity to do a Camargo Fellowship, after I had written half the piece. I went to Southern France and wrote the second half of the piece. I followed the same process, realizing that walking in water somehow helps. It was my first time to the Mediterranean, but it made a lot of the scenes make sense to me, the way he described it; I could actually feel it. And there were other sounds that came to mind I didn't picture, like the church bells that would happen every hour and different kinds of water than I was used to. All of that was part of the process.
You're describing all of this sensory and experiential research, and it's not a direct translation into the music, but it makes sense. Because the score is so enveloping, and it kind of slips through your fingers; it's very flowy.
I’m happy to hear that. I think it was the only way to create this particular piece. I've composed vocal music before, and I'm always telling a story, in one way or another. I think for this one, with the characters over time, and with the intensity of the play, I had these moments where I was able to just lock in for a certain amount of time, like I'm in Tennessee Williams’ world. Then I would actually need to step out of it for a while. There was no in-between with this piece: you go into that mindset of the patient who's fearing a lobotomy, or the mother who's trying to silence her niece, or thinking about the dead character that we never get to meet. I would be in that world, and then I would need to step away from it.
This is a play very much about motives and memory, and like the unreliability of all of it. You're never on solid footing with anyone's story. Did that actually give you some kind of material to work with, or a direction?
It did. One of the things with the Tennessee Williams estate is that you couldn't add any words, but you could move them around, or you could take some away. As librettists, Daniel and Gideon did some creative things that really affected the music — they’d include some text from Catherine, or have her in a scene, earlier than she had entered in the play. Or have certain texts be in Scene 1 that come back in Scene 3. Musically, a lot of that helped with the idea of Catherine telling her story, and being committed in a mental institution, and being under all kinds of medication and having the fear of what was going to happen to her. She's doing a lot of repetition, and she's described as babbling, so musically that was like a nice challenge to think of how to have her present from the beginning but her words are very abstract. By the time she starts telling her story, it's like a kind of nonstop aria. So that helped with it.
Yeah.
I think not ever getting to hear from the main character, Sebastian, raises a lot of questions. And that helped, creatively, with how to feel about him. I started off very sympathetic to him, as this person whose mother was so controlling, and he couldn't be his full self. He had to hide his sexuality, and lead this double life. But on the other hand, he was taking advantage of boys — and boys that were described as darker and poor. So he was also a predator. I guess the main conclusion I came to is that you're just going to feel a lot of things at one time. Nothing gets resolved. The main character that I could really empathize with in the end was the young woman, Catherine. We did kind of center her, but I like having that as a project because it was nice talking with the singer and the actors about the piece itself, and the musicians in the band, too. Everybody was curious about things and how it related to Tennessee Williams' life.
There's a structural bias here too, because Catherine is the only character who gets to sing your music. That's really unusual in opera, of course. So I want to ask you about that. Can you talk about how that happened, and how it affected you as the composer?
In my mind, everyone was singing. And at the first workshop in New Orleans, we worked with local singers that I know, and got to hear it in different ways. Somehow during that workshop, Daniel had the idea that these should be actors, Miss Venable and the Doctor, and that Catherine should be the only one singing. It was this idea of the truth, and her trying to communicate it. From the beginning, we knew we were going to invite Michaela Bennett to be the singer. But musically, I always had Tina Benko's voice in my head, too: she's the actor who played Mrs. Venable, and she was part of our workshops from early on. So just like I had Michaela's singing voice in my head as I created, I had Tina's voice in my head, acting. It was a challenge to make sure that the music that I had for the acting was just as purposeful as the music for the singing, and there’s never a long moment where it isn't both at the same time. It was kind of like doing a puzzle.
The New York Times ran a story before the premiere, which shared a bit about your process with Michaela. Unusually for an opera, she had a lot of input in the shape of her melodic lines. And I say unusually for opera, but this is how Duke Ellington worked. That seems like a particular kind of flexibility that you bring to this equation.
Yes, and I love that way of working. I was glad that she and I were both equally excited about that. Everything she did sing in the end was fully written out. There wasn't improv in the performance. But I came with these pieces, and with her voice in mind. So I had some music written, but once we were in these workshops together, we could try stuff out. There was a part where I was like, “I have no idea what I want to write right here.” But I had some harmonies, and I was like, “Can you improvise over this?” It wasn't so much taking down what she did in that moment, but I got an idea of these different parts of her voice. I remember getting to hear her voice at its very lowest, and at the highest, just to get an idea of her range. And she gave me a lot of technical notes, too: things to consider for her voice or to consider for the piece itself, which is basically an hour of her singing. And of course I gave her all these vocal-acrobatic things. So having that moment together and learning things — like, “Oh, this is what it sounds like when she sings a low G,” or “Here's all these different ranges of expressions that she has in her voice that are very unique to her as an artist.” I love when I get to do that.
I have to ask about your work with birdsong. You did field research, and it's not a small part of this opera. It's really foregrounded at times. How did that play out for you? It strikes me that birdsong is not just a cue, it's like a key.
I remember learning about Messiaen and how meticulous he was with studying birds and writing out their songs. I always thought that was interesting. But for me it has to do with my sister Amy, who's an artist. Both of my sisters are visual artists, but during the pandemic Amy became a birder. She really got into photographing them, and next thing you know, she could just hear and identify them from, like, a mile away. So I was first presented with this piece three years ago, and I was working on another piece for the International Contemporary Ensemble. It's called Dreaming Freedom Sounds. There was a line by Farrah Griffin about listening to the birds and nature, and about grace. I was also thinking about it in this context of birds and freedom.
So that's when I started figuring out my own way to include birdsongs in my piece. I would sit outside, or go to different parts of the city, and listen to birds and write it down. Tennessee Williams was very specific in different parts. He would have lines, like “a bird singing sweetly in the distance.” Or it would say something about “flesh-eating birds.” So I actually went through the whole libretto. I remember sitting in my backyard and circling every time a bird was mentioned. Seeing what he used — like sweet birds, flesh-eating birds, carnivorous birds. I just kind of had my own chart of his words, and then I started looking up what birds fit that.
But the most fun part was when we had a workshop with the YPC, Young People's Chorus. I had the boys sing music that I'd written, and then I wanted to do an exercise where they would sing the birdsongs the way I had them written. I just wanted to try it out. And they really knocked it out of the park, and had so much fun with it, too. So when I heard them do it, and I had it recorded, I was like, “Oh, this is not a background thing.” Everybody at some point becomes a bird. All the instrumentalists, all the choir members at some point become a bird.
There's a quote that your production designer projects on the back wall. I looked up the full quote, and I want to read it. Tennessee Williams said: “Life is cannibalistic. Truly. Egos eat egos, personalities eat personalities. Someone is always eating at someone else for position, gain, triumph, greed, whatever. The human individual is a cannibal in the worst way.” How do you feel about that idea and how it plays out in this drama?
Definitely in the story, I see how that fits, and then I can see it in our current times. I can see the level of greed and disdain for humanity. And when people like that are in power, I think about how long it takes to build institutions, and then how quickly people can destroy them. When we started the piece, it was before the Epstein trials became central to the news, and then the piece kept taking on different meanings based on what was going on. But yeah, his thing about cannibalism, it's a true thing about human behavior, but I feel like it is balanced out with those who are creating or doing the opposite: creating and looking out for one another, fighting for one another.
Well, so much of your work outside of this is about the opposite, right? It's about the better angels of our nature, and uplift and spirit. So it is interesting to think about how every character in this is kind of like, “What can I get out of this?”
It's very real in that way. I feel like I couldn't do a piece if there wasn't some element of hope, but this does stand out among my pieces. Usually it's about very difficult things in life, and the focus is on hope. I think in this one, making Catherine the central character, the hope is in her speaking the truth, no matter what. She wouldn't let anybody silence her, even if it meant that she could be put under the scalpel and have a lobotomy — but she was always speaking her truth. So that was the element of hope in this. I think to be able to musically highlight the strength of her character was a goal. But it was a particularly rough piece in that way. There’s no clear hero. Everything's kind of difficult. But it was very human and very, very real.
Opera Philadelphia's production of Suddenly Last Summer runs Oct. 22, 23 and 25 at the Forrest Theater; tickets and information.
