9/10: Love Before the Fall

A bittersweet, loving, ultimately cathartic evocation of a perfect moment in the lives of four New Yorkers set in Little Italy the night before the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

  • libretto and screenplay: Daron Hagen (E,I)

  • cast: 4 singing characters (non gender-specific); violinist; 2 mute; optional chorus

  • instrumentation: fixed media and/or 0-42 acoustic players

  • duration: 60 minutes

AMELIA

A first time mother-to-be, whose psyche has been scarred by the loss of her pilot-father in Vietnam, must break free from anxiety to embrace healing and renewal for the sake of her husband and child.

  • libretto: Gardner McFall / story: Stephen Wadsworth (E,V)

  • cast: 9 principals; 9 supporting roles; supers

  • instrumentation: 44 players; 34 players

  • duration: 120 minutes

THE ANTIENT CONCERT

John McCormack and James Joyce square off at the 1904 Feis Ceoil competition recital in a story about the collision of words, music, performance, sex, death, and nationalism.

  • libretto: Paul Muldoon (E)

  • cast: 4 singing characters (non gender-specific)

  • instrumentation: piano or string quartet

  • duration: 60 minutes

BANDANNA

Touch of Evil is crossed with Under the Volcano in this searing, "soaringly eclectic" post-verismo retelling of Shakespeare’s Othello set in the spiritual, physical, and ethical "liminal zone" of the Texas-Mexican border on the "Day of the Dead" in 1968.

  • libretto: Paul Muldoon (E,S)

  • cast: 6 principals; 2 supporting; mixed chorus; supers

  • instrumentation: wind orchestra

  • duration: 120 minutes

GEORGE WASHINGTON SUITE

In a hotel room somewhere near the site of General George Washington's 1776 crossing of the Delaware River, two academics encounter the ghost of George Washington.

  • libretto: Rob Handel (E)

  • cast: 4 singing roles (non gender-specific); 1 mute; chorus

  • instrumentation: 5 players

  • duration: 11 minutes

I HEAR AMERICA SINGING

A composer and two longtime singer friends prepare for a backer’s audition of ”a musical about musicals” called I Hear America Singing.

  • book and lyrics: Daron Hagen (E)

  • cast: 3 singers (non gender-specific)

  • instrumentation: piano or jazz trio

  • duration: 100 minutes

JEKYLL AND HYDE

Reality and fantasy collide when a graduate student struggling with an addiction to opiates begins to hallucinate during a screening of the 1920 silent movie Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

  • scenario and words: Daron Hagen and Barbara Grecki (E)

  • cast: 4-6 principals (non gender-specific); optional chorus

  • instrumentation: fixed media and/or 0-42 players

  • duration: 90 minutes

LITTLE NEMO IN SLUMBERLAND

A child named Nemo inspired by Winsor McCay’s surrealist comics dreams that he is on a mission to save the “world of dreams,” Slumberland.

  • libretto: J.D. McClatchy (E)

  • cast: 9 principals (non gender-specific); chorus

  • instrumentation: 13 players; 8 players

  • duration: 65 minutes

NEW YORK STORIES

Three intimate, intertwined true stories of real-life New Yorkers—one funny, one tragic, and one tender—unfold over the course of twenty-four hours.

  • libretto: Barbara Grecki and Daron Hagen (E)

  • cast: 2-6 principals (non gender-specific)

  • instrumentation: piano or 13 players

  • duration: 65 minutes

ORSON REHEARSED

Orson Welles' heart has just stopped. We enter his mind in this moment, on the threshold between life and death.Three avatars onstage in the theater of his mind are paired with three films within the film as he shuffles through his memories, loves, regrets.

  • concept, libretto, screenplay: Daron Hagen (E)

  • cast: 3 (non gender-specific); optional chorus

  • instrumentation: fixed media and/or 0-42 players

  • duration: 65 minutes

MADNESS AND SORROW

A monodrama that repurposes newspaper articles, diaries, and psychiatric reports to explore the childlike feelings of helplessness, panic and rage created by the inhuman, amoral fluctuations of a market economy and the equally inhuman ravages of epidemic disease that were prevalent in the small towns of Upstate Wisconsin at the close of the nineteenth century.

  • words: adapted from 19th century documents by Daron Hagen (E)

  • cast: 1 singer (non gender-specific)

  • instrumentation: piano or 14 players

  • duration: 28 minutes

SHINING BROW

Frank Lloyd Wright's determination to leave his wife and children, his relationship with Mamah Cheney, and the subsequent murders and conflagration at Taliesin unfold, leaving Wright at the point at which he vows to rebuild Taliesin in Mamah's memory.

  • libretto: Paul Muldoon (E)

  • cast: 5 principals; 12 supporting roles drawn from chorus

  • instrumentation: 50, 31, 24, and 7 player versions available

  • duration: 120, 90, 60 minute versions available

VERA OF LAS VEGAS

A slow-motion spiritual meltdown in which four deeply alienated individuals—two IRA volunteers, an INS agent, and a lap dancer—suffering from denial and an inability to connect emotionally with others find themselves in Vegas, where the truths buried in their pasts re-emerge in increasingly spasmodic, acid-trip-like flashbacks.

  • libretto: Paul Muldoon (E)

  • cast: 4 principals (non gender-specific); chorus

  • instrumentation: 16 players; 10 players; jazz quartet

  • duration: 65 minutes

A WOMAN IN MOROCCO

When a young investigative journalist checks in to a run-down Pensione in Morocco in 1968, her life unravels as its denizens involve her in a world of drug use and sex trafficking.

  • libretto: Barbara Grecki and Daron Hagen (E,F)

  • cast: 8 principals (non gender-specific); chorus

  • instrumentation: fixed media and 24 players; 12 players

  • duration: 120 minutes