Collaborative "Nightmare Opera" Receives Staged Premiere June 26-27

Composer Hagen and Librettist Muldoon Team Up Again

(June 18, 2003) — Vera of Las Vegas - a "nightmare cabaret opera in one act" that is the creation of Yaddo artists Daron Hagen and Paul Muldoon - will receive its world staged premiere June 26-27 at Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theater at Symphony Space in New York City.

The Center for Contemporary Opera, under the artistic direction of Richard Marshall, will present two shows daily, at 7:30 and 9:30 p.m., starring Shequida, Patricia Dell, Elem Eley, and Dillon McCartney in a work that envelopes the audience into the opera. The action of the opera takes place throughout the performing space, including the audience.

Mr. Hagen, a composer often considered at the leading edge of contemporary opera, says Vera of Las Vegas "takes place in the lurid imagination of Taco, a man on the receiving end of a brutal interrogation. He passes out, and the audience finds itself in a Vegas cocktail lounge, where, for the next 60 minutes, they witness the unraveling of his mind. Appropriately, the story has the surreal, perhaps super-real logic of dreams: it is ostensibly about how two on-the-lam IRA volunteers, Taco and his best friend Dumdum, are set up by a rogue INS agent named Doll and her friend Vera, an African-American transvestite lap-dancer, during a layover in Las Vegas."

Mr. Muldoon, Vera's librettist, describes the story of the opera as "serendipitous," explaining that the University of Nevada at Las Vegas asked for an opera which, once he and Mr. Hagen went to work, turned out to be "in some sense, site-specific." The prize-winning poet says he and Mr. Hagen didn't realize "how much fun it would be to tell Las Vegas taxi drivers that we were in town purely and simply for the opera. It is, of course, out of such accidents that works of art have so often been made, on the stream of such coincidences that we're carried along."

Vera isn't the first collaboration for the two artists: Mr. Muldoon has written the librettos for two other major operas composed by Mr. Hagen, Shining Brow, based on the life of Frank Lloyd Wright, and Bandanna, loosely based on Othello and set in a small town on the United States-Mexico border in 1968.

A long-time Member of The Corporation of Yaddo, Mr. Hagen was born in 1961 in Wisconsin and trained at the Curtis Institute of Music and Juilliard. He has been commissioned by many of America's foremost musical institutions and performers, including the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Curtis Institute, ASCAP, Brooklyn Philharmonic, Kings Singers, Gary Graffman, Jaime Laredo, Sharon Robinson, Blair Bollinger, Jeffrey Khaner, Paul Sperry, Ashley Putnam, Paul Kreider, and the orchestras of Milwaukee, Denver, Albany, Madison, and New Mexico, among others. Recognized with the Kennedy Center Friedheim Prize, an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Rockefeller Foundation Grant, his music is found on the CRI, Albany, and Arsis labels. After a decade teaching at Bard College, Princeton, and the Curtis Institute, Mr. Hagen left academe in 1998 to devote himself fulltime to making music. He currently is fulfilling commissions from the National Symphony Orchestra, the Puerto Rico Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, Buffalo Philharmonic and the Amernet String Quartet, and working on a new chamber opera entitled Broken Pieces.

Mr. Muldoon, who received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and the International Griffin Poetry Prize for his collection Moy Sand and Gravel, has been described by The Times Literary Supplement as "the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War. He was born in 1951 in Northern Ireland and was educated in Armagh and at the Queen's University of Belfast. From 1973 to 1986, he worked in Belfast as a radio and television producer for the British Broadcasting Corporation. Since 1987 he has lived in the United States, where he is now Howard G.B. Clark '21 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. In 1999, he was elected Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford. Besides Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), Mr. Muldoon's main collections of poetry include New Weather (1973), Mules (1977), Why Brownlee Left (1980), Quoof (1983), Meeting the British (1987), Madoc: A Mystery (1990), The Annals of Chile (1994), Hay (1998), and Poems 1968-1998 (2001). A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Mr. Muldoon was given an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature for 1996. Other recent awards are the 1994 T.S. Eliot Prize and the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize.

To hear excerpts from the opera and an interview in which Mr. Hagen describes the opera, click here. For additional information, visit the official Vera of Las Vegas website at www.burningsled.com/vera.html. Tickets for the opera are $45 and $35 at the Symphony Space box office, 212.864.5400 or www.symphonyspace.org.