Ten years ago, Fellow Travelers “was history; now the opera is news,” said author Thomas Mallon opening night Feb. 21 at Seattle Opera. His book, Fellow Travelers, was published in 2007, almost 20 years ago. The opera premiered in Cincinnati in 2016.
Mallon’s novel on which this English-language opera is based tells a love story amid a fearful and homophobic time in the United States during the 1950s. Now the opera is making a 10-year anniversary tour, and after its four-performance Portland visit March 7 through 15, it will visit San Diego, Glimmerglass, Austin, Texas, and most probably Washington, DC, though the opera will not be at the Kennedy Center. (The team pulled Fellow Travelers in 2025 from the Kennedy Center, noting it could not move forward with the Kennedy Center’s new leadership.)
The two-hour drama finished up a six-performance run March 1 in Seattle, where 10,000 tickets were sold for the six shows. The opera portrays a heart-breaking and clandestine gay love story amid the discriminatory politics of the 1950s, where thousands of LGBTQ+ people were spied on and fired from the U.S. government. Called the Lavender Scare, it was a time and event about which most people know much less than they do the accompanying Red Scare.
The same opera, though on a smaller scale due to Portland’s Newmark Theatre’s stage, opens March 7, followed by performances March 11, 13 and 15. All shows are at 7:30 pm, except March 15, which is a 2 pm matinee. Premieres for the Seattle and Portland operas, Fellow Travelers is produced with Up Until Now Collective, and that group has visions of the opera opening on Broadway. Eventually. Already there has been a Showtime series.
Now in 2026, have things changed that much politically, even if gay marriage has been legal since 2015, and more people feel safe enough to disclose their sexual orientation?
Not really. We are in another stage of the Lavender Scare that surfaced 70 years ago, said Fellow Travelers Stage Director Kevin Newbury in a phone interview early this month from Seattle. During the 1950s, government officials claimed that homosexuals would be traitors, because, as the logic went, they could be blackmailed to reveal secrets during Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist Red Scare. Federal employees suspected of being gay were run through humiliating tests by government interrogators, including having to walk across a room and respond to a sensuously written passage in W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage about a woman’s clothes. Both are illustrated in the opera.
History is repeating itself 70 years later, just in a different way. The government is “systematically trying to erase our history with the demonization of trans and non-binary community,” Newbury said. “It has given itself license to hate.”
More about love than hate
The opera, however, is more about love than hate. Newbury, who started the process of making Mallon’s book into an opera long before it premiered in Cincinnati in 2016, said, “I believe in the power of a really good love story to shape hearts and minds.”
And that is what happens in this two-hour fast-moving thriller amid a moving wall of file cabinets, signaling the surveillance atmosphere. The cabinets change into other pieces of furniture moved around by the cast, making for quick and unfussy scenic changes.
In the thick of the spying atmosphere, a sophisticated and handsome government official Hawkins Fuller – sung by baritone Jarrett Ott in the Seattle show I saw, but double-cast with Joseph Lattanzi, who will sing the part in the Portland shows – falls in love with a naive journalist, Timothy Laughlin making his way in Washington, DC. Laughlin was performed by stupendous tenor Colin Aikins in the show I saw, and was double-cast with Andy Acosta, who will sing the role in Portland performances. The third major character is the empathetic Mary, performed by soprano Amber R. Monroe, who serves as the opera’s moral compass and deservedly received the most applause at the Seattle opening night.
Despite the urge to stereotype in a drama like this (older guy seduces naive younger guy, nasty homophobic secretary Miss Lightfoot sung by soprano Vanessa Becerra begins the downfall of the lovers, and paranoid Joe McCarthy who leaves a bad taste in many Americans’ mouths performed by Marcus DeLoach) the characters are “complicated, rich, not good or evil. They are multi-dimensional,” Newbury said.
Gregory Spears wrote the music that is easy to listen to though not easy-listening in the smarmy radio sense. The music is romantic and lush, but not so lush it falls into sentimentality. The opera was composed without a chorus, but plenty of duets and a few ensemble moments balance out the arias. The orchestra, conducted in Seattle by Steven Osgood, never overpowered the singers. The orchestra pit usually has 17 musicians; string musicians are added at bigger venues. The libretto, written by Greg Pierce, is tightly constructed, with little wandering off on sidetracks, though there is a somewhat distracting part concerning the controversy of McCarthy and Roy Cohn’s special treatment of a rich guy, David Schine, in the Army. (These details are based on fact.) McCarthy, however, doesn’t spend a lot of time on the stage. Hawk and Timothy’s fraught and intense love story is front and center, despite the lurking and leering surveillance.
The opera’s intimacy propels much of the opera and the lead characters pull it off tastefully, singing duets while positioning themselves in bed, on benches, at an office Christmas party. All the moves, the many embraces and kisses plus more, are choreographed by intimacy director Sara Widzer, as intricately as fight scenes in some operas. As Timothy becomes a more seasoned lover, his boxer shorts get shorter and then there are no boxer shorts at all. “The butt, what about that?” said a waitress at intermission who was watching from McCaw Hall’s TV screen in the dining room. “Whoa, I’ve never seen that.”
Same here, at least in opera. (Broadway and theater are different stories.) But as Newbury said in defending the nudity – only the New York performance goers saw a bare butt ten years ago – “everyone watches all these HBO shows anyway” so the TV-nudity inoculation seems to be thorough enough to absorb shock. So far, he’s gotten no pushback.
Infinitely scalable
A small opera in cast and size, the opera can shrink or expand, depending on the venue. “It’s built to tour. It’s scalable,” Newbury said. In Portland, the opera’s sets will be reduced. Instead of six humongous file cabinets there will be three for the cast to push around and reconfigure.
Newbury has directed several operas in Portland, including Eugene Onegin, Postcard from Morocco and Galileo Galilei at Newmark Theatre, so he is familiar with the stage. Portland Opera will have its own orchestra, and Acosta and Lattanzi, who has been performing the Hawk role since the opera’s debut, will sing all four Portland performances. The March 11 performance will be “community night” with substantial discounts offered to LGBTQ+ and affinity groups. Tickets are available at portlandopera.org.
Added to this tour is the Lavender Names Project, which is an archive of stories and photos from LGBTQ+ people, done in collaboration with the LGBTQ+ Museum in New York. The project is seeking stories from people who want to describe their 1950s Lavender Scare history, or recount a story about the 1990s military policy of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, or write about any other personal experience.
The opera’s final scene shows a scrim rising on hundreds of photos of people with these stories. It is a moving tribute, as is the opera of the struggles of LGBTQ+ people. Newbury has directed theater and films in addition to opera, and though an arts-directing “omnivore,” as he calls himself, opera remains his favorite art to shape. He believes in its power, and the power of its music. “When opera is good, it does what nothing else can do.”
