Since the subject of the opera is the 1998 murder of gay Wyoming college student Matthew Shepard, it was an almost-instantaneous artistic reflection on the issues raised by gunman Omar Mateen’s act of rage.
Now, as the full opera prepares for its world premiere tonight at Florida Atlantic University, it now can be seen as a kind of commentary on the remarkably divisive presidential race.
“The message I get from (Donald) Trump is hating the different; it’s a message of hate, of being scared of different people, of thinking the worst of someone,” said soprano Robyn Marie Lamp, who sings the role of Romaine Patterson, Shepard’s closest friend at school who became a prominent LGBT activist after his murder. “When I believe, and this opera tries to say, that different is not bad. It’s a message of acceptance.”
Tenor Ryan Townsend, who sings the part of Shepard, also finds topical currency in the piece.
“I think it’s very relevant, and will always be relevant,” he said. “There always will be people who are bigoted and carry hatred in their heart … The wonderful thing about this show is that Matt was a young man who wasn’t a celebrity, he wasn’t a sports figure, he wasn’t anyone of note.
“But he was you, he was me, he was our brother, our sister, our cousin, our son and our daughter,” Townsend said. “It’s about the hate crime, and it’s about standing up for what’s right.”
Matthew Shepard was 21 in October 1998 when two men robbed him, beat him and tied him to a fence in Laramie, Wyo. He died six days later at a Colorado hospital, and while court testimony in the trial of his two assailants indicated that Shepard’s sexual orientation was not the only reason for the attack, a major piece of federal hate crimes legislation was named for him and James Byrd Jr., a black man who was murdered in June 1998 by white supremacists who tied him to a truck in Jasper, Texas, and dragged him for miles until he died.
Ross, 47, a Watertown, N.Y., native who now lives in Wilton Manors, originally wrote the libretto and music for Not In My Town in 2012 at the behest of one of the schools where he teaches, which asked him to write it for an LGBT-themed event. It was expanded for Opera Fusion, Birgit Fioravante and Dean Peterson’s fledgling West Palm Beach-based company, and now contains 13 scenes.
Ross, too, finds parallels with today’s turbulent politics and the action of his opera, which he prefers to call a “musical drama”; its music draws freely on pop and Broadway traditions as well as the language of a composer such as Samuel Barber.
“What’s depressing about it is that there are so many followers of his,” said Ross, referring to Trump. “Half the country is supposedly voting for this guy, and he keeps making faux pas, and racial slurs. I don’t get it.”
Ross said the election of 2000 was another low point in American politics, but for different reasons.
“This one is different. I remember when George W. (Bush) was going in, I was thinking, ‘Oh, God, he’s not a smart man.’ I was really worried. But I survived eight years of it,” Ross said.
“But this is different. This is hate, not stupidity, and that’s what makes it dangerous,” he said.
After his death and a candlelight vigil, Patterson disrupts an anti-gay demonstration organized by the Rev. Fred Phelps (Enrique Estrada) by bringing in demonstrators wearing giant angel wings that cover the messages on signs held by Phelps’s demonstrators. Following Dennis’s victim statement in court, the opera ends with Patterson addressing the Anti-Defamation League.
Although Shepard’s death is the engine that drives the opera’s action, much of the work has to do with Patterson and how she moved forward after the loss of her friend. Lamp, 29, who grew up in Lake Worth and holds degrees in vocal performance from FAU and Louisiana State University, said Ross’s writing is gratifying to sing, an important consideration given that she is on stage most of the time.
“It’s so well-written for the voice and so melodic,” she said. “He wrote it for a mezzo, and so it’s not extremely high for me. I can sing in that tessitura for hours. It suits my voice perfectly.”
She particularly likes singing her solo aria (“When Did the World Stop Caring”), which takes place after Romaine learns that Matt has been injured and is in the hospital.
“He had invited her out, but she said no, so she thinks, would this have happened if I had gone with him? And she goes through all the phases — guilt, anger, denial — and finally she pleads with whoever is upstairs that he survive,” Lamp said. “And it’s so well-written, and it’s dramatic, and it’s sweet. It’s my favorite part.”
Townsend, 28, said he is singing the role of Shepard more in the style of musical theater, though he has sung more opera in his career so far than musicals. He said he has tried to make his portrayal as close to the historical reality as he can despite the paucity of source material.
“He’s kind of an icon to the LGBTQ community, and when we have those kind of icons we tend to make them holier than thou. And he wasn’t that,” said Townsend, a Philadelphia native who earned vocal performance degrees at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Miami. “He was just like another human: he was flawed … But he always wanted to help people, and he was a very generous person who just wanted to see people around him happy.”
Ross said the Sunshine Cathedral excerpts were well-attended and received, and there is substantial interest in the show from other possible producers, including a college.
“We had someone from a university come who said that said they might want to stage it themselves at their college, and I have a producer from New York coming down,” he said. “We’re just trying to get through the next couple weeks, but I don’t want it to not have a life of its own.”
If he revises the work after these performances, he said he might turn it into a two-act opera, but would want to add a 14th scene in order to do that. In the meantime, he’s written a work about Harriet Tubman (The Line That Divides), his fourth opera; the other two are works about Holocaust victim Anne Frank (Yours Truly, Anne), and Medusa, the Gorgon of Greek mythology (Head of Medusa).
The writing of the expanded Not In My Town has coincided with the Orlando massacre and the rise of Trump, and Ross said these things have pushed him back into a life with more activism.
“Because of what’s happened lately, I’ve been thrust back into doing more activist stuff, on Facebook and going to certain meetings. So it’s brought me back,” he said. “It’s not what I set out to do, but I’m happy to do it because it’s for a good cause.”
Not In My Town will be presented at 7 tonight and 3 p.m. Sunday at the University Theatre on the campus of Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. Tickets are $20, and are available through fauevents.com. Two more performances are scheduled for 8 p.m. Friday and 8 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 1, at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts in Fort Lauderdale. Tickets are $35, and available through www.operafusion.org.