Many operas in the standard repertoire are based on fairy tales and fantasy. But few of those describe a global queer-feminist revolution, and fewer still have main characters whose names begin with “Warren” and end with an unusual moniker for a genital appendage.
Both can be found in “The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions,” a new piece of music theater by the composer Philip Venables and the writer-director Ted Huffman. After premiering at the Manchester International Festival on Thursday, it will travel, with its original roster of 15 performers, to the Aix-en-Provence Festival in early July, then elsewhere, including NYU Skirball in New York this fall.
Venables and Huffman’s two previous collaborations — the operas “4.48 Psychosis,” based on Sarah Kane’s play about mental illness and suicide, and “Denis & Katya,” about teenage lovers in Russia who died in a 2016 livestreamed standoff with Russian police — have won them acclaim as artists who find beauty at the extremes of form and subject matter.
Their new show, freely adapted from a gay liberation fantasy novel of the same name that was self-published by the activist Larry Mitchell in 1977, is both a continuation of that broader project and, as Venables said dryly in a video interview, “a tonal shift.”
The piece, like the novel, covers thousands of years of human history, telling the story of the rise of an imperialist capitalist patriarchy called Ramrod; the resistance to that patriarchy by the sexual and racial Others it has created; and its eventual defeat by a revolutionary queer coalition.
“There are two important things to remember about the coming revolutions,” this fairy tale reads, on the page and onstage. “The first is that we will get our [expletive] kicked. The second is that we will win.”
Over the show’s 90 minutes, Rosie Elnile’s deceptively simple, bare stage becomes a model of this improvisatory, revolutionary utopia. Everything you hear, you see: The 15 performers play a largely memorized score on a mixed ensemble of baroque and modern instruments. A harpsichord, a theorbo and a viola da gamba sound alongside an upright piano and an electric organ.
The result is a romp through history that’s both joyous and politically serious. “These stories of oppression and resistance are performed with and for each other,” Venables said, “as part of our processing of and resistance to oppression.” And the piece proposes and enacts the destruction of what it calls “the men’s categories” — the classifications of race, gender, expertise and taste that, it argues, stop the global majority from becoming free.
“We all, at some stage in a utopia, want to get past identity politics to this universalism,” Venables said.
The actor-choreographer Yandass, who narrates large portions of the show, said in a video interview that the show’s form echoes its politics: “Everyone is multiskilled in so many ways. I would imagine that’s how the utopia that’s dreamed of in this piece would be, everyone having different talents, having to rely on each other for cues, engaging in real teamwork.”
When Mitchell wrote his book, he was inspired by Lavender Hill, a gay commune that he was a founding member of in Ithaca, N.Y. Such communes, which rejected both straight society and a gay movement that they saw as consumerist and assimilationist, peppered late 1970s and early 1980s America. They were places filled with political theorizing, collective cultural expression, and folk and baroque music. “Carl later gave the visiting harpsichordist a copy of ‘Eros and Civilization,’” reads a representative quote from a diary of life at a mid-1970s commune in the gay liberation journal RFD.
Activists — many of whom, like Mitchell, settled on the word “faggot” to imply a gender-expansive, sex-positive and politically radical gay subjectivity — believed that collective movement had the power to change the world, and that folk and baroque dances were forms infused with political radicalism.
In a video interview, Venables called this a “politics of pleasure and joy and play and community,” one he has sought to express in a musical style in which “form and genre are a way of putting on costumes and telling stories, with folk and baroque music references having to do with community music making, social gatherings and social rituals.”
One aria, for example, starts as a duet between the soprano Mariamielle Lamagat and the harpist Joy Smith, before the gambist Jacob Garside joins in — on glockenspiel, and wearing a multicolored evening gown — helping to initiate a transformation of the tune into a swinging bossa nova, and eventually an accordion-accompanied shanty.
The book that inspired all this — despite, or perhaps because of, how rooted it is in its specific political moment — has had a recent revival. After years of being out of print, with copies and PDFs circulating among gay artists and activists like samizdat, it was republished in 2018.
“I had questions about how Ted wanted to stage it because it felt uncomfortable doing some halcyon utopian thing set in the 1970s,” said Kit Green, one of the show’s narrators. “He is doing it in a way, though, where we are not part of the book. We’re telling it; there’s a distance. We’re on this massive time continuum, and when things feel hopeless, this sense that time rolls on, that we are a part of something bigger, feels different and exciting. We need that revolutionary zeal — but what does it mean now? We should all be asking that question.”
As the performers gathered onstage during a dress rehearsal this week, Yshani Perinpanayagam — the music director, as well as a member of the cast — said: “There have been so many beautiful moments of connection today on- and off-set. If something doesn’t go as expected, just yes/and it. Go with it.”
In the show, feats of technical bravado — in one early scene, Garside plays complex music on gamba while lying on his back on a blanket being dragged across the stage — are paired with simpler collective actions, like an aria accompanied both by the trained violin playing of Conor Gricmanis, as well as by much of the cast playing on the open strings of violins, a simple echoing of harmonies. Perinpanayagam gives some cues, but mostly the musicians play without a conductor.
“We wanted to make it feel like a community onstage, to try to break down some of the hierarchies and traditional relationships that different art forms have onstage, especially classical music stages,” Huffman said in a video interview. “Asking everyone onstage to participate in everything is not a spirit of amateurism but of willingness to test one’s creativity, of finding beauty in simple things.”
The challenge of the score, the flutist Eric Lamb said, is in “the physicality, the movement.” He added that he hoped audiences would “witness this love and understanding of 15 people onstage who inhabit various spaces within the queer community holding each other up and caring for each other.”
These artists believe that the revolutions the piece aims to incite are both current and urgent. “Everything that I’d thought about my life made sense,” Yandass said, describing reading the book for the first time. “This is how I should have been living. I felt called out in terms of not sticking to my queerness, not sticking to my being. It helped me understand my thinking and my instincts.”
Green mentioned the final section — in which the performers scream, “And the third revolution engulfs us all!” — and added, “I had a proper feeling of ‘Let’s do this! Let’s go out and start it!’”
Ben Miller
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