[This article appears in the November/December 2019 issue of Boston Spirit magazine. Subscribe for free today.]
When author Thomas Mallon discovered that there was interest in turning his 2007 historical novel “Fellow Travelers” into an opera, his first thought was, ‘You mean the book’s not gay enough already?’
On the surface, “Fellow Travelers,” a political thriller set during the McCarthy era of the 1950s when men and women suspected of homosexuality could be blackmailed and purged from their US government positions, might seem an odd choice for an opera. But, says Mallon, the more he talked with librettist Greg Pierce and Kevin Newberry, the show’s original director, the more it made sense to him.
Audiences will get to see the New England premiere of “Fellow Travelers” when the Boston Lyric Opera stages its own production November 13-17 at Emerson Paramount Center. Peter Rothstein directs the opera, by composer Spears and librettist Pierce, which will be conducted by Emily Senturia. The BLO production stars Jesse Darden as Timothy; Jesse Blumberg as Hawkins; and Chelsea Basler as Mary Johnson, Hawkins’s assistant and best friend.
“There is something outsized about the emotions in the book. They’re heightened generally because everything in the book is so claustrophobic; everything takes place behind closed doors, with drawn shades. There are necessarily furtive aspects of the romance that in some ways heighten the emotions,” says Mallon in a phone interview from his home in Washington, DC.
With music composed by Gregory Spears, “Fellow Travelers” the opera details Mallon’s tale of the furtive romance between powerful State Department executive Hawkins “Hawk” Fuller and young Washington, DC transplant Timothy Laughlin that begins after Hawkins secures the young man his first job as a speechwriter. Hawkins’ circle of friends and colleagues may—or may not— be keeping his secret from the prying eyes of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Timothy, whom Mallon says he based loosely on himself, struggles to reconcile his political convictions and his Catholic faith with his forbidden love for Fuller—an entanglement that will end in a stunning act of betrayal.
Mallon, who earned his undergraduate degree at Brown University, spent five years at Harvard where he “got to see bits and pieces of Fuller’s rich, WASP world in comparison to Timothy’s. I identified with Timothy, but I’d seen enough of each world to be able to attempt the fiction of it,” he says. “The opera did a superb job with the fact that even with all the political factors in this story—and obviously it is a highly political piece of material—one of the reasons it works as opera is it is still just a story, a romance. I discovered over the years that virtually every gay man has, at one point in his life, dated a Hawkins Fuller—a guy who is mesmerizing but not good for them, ultimately.”
After nearly 10 years developing the project and raising the funds, “Fellow Travelers” debuted in 2016 at Cincinnati Opera. A minimalist chamber opera, it was hailed by critics as “Mad Men” meets “House of Cards” and has now been performed all over the country, including productions in New York City and Chicago. Washington DC will get its own production in 2020.
“I was aware when I sat down to write about Timothy, I was trying to imagine what my life would have been like if I’d been born 20 years earlier,” Mallon says. “The only thing I asked Greg [Pierce] was ‘don’t make religion and politics into a joke.’ I miss my religion to this day. Homosexuality, probably more than anything else, came between me and my religion. That’s a real thing; it’s not a cliché about Catholic guilt … Timothy doesn’t see why he can’t be a conservative and Catholic and still love who he wants to love. The book’s pivotal scene is when he has his first sexual encounter with Fuller and then races to confession on Capitol Hill and realizes he can’t confess it. He thinks it is a gift from God. That’s him; he’s a braver character than the more worldly Fuller.”
Mallon’s literary successes span nonfiction, including many New Yorker essays, and historical novels that seamlessly blend fictional and real-life characters. That’s especially true of “Fellow Travelers,” in which many politicians from both parties are quick to jump on McCarthy’s bandwagon. The Red Scare was “accepted across the board” in 1950s Washington, says Mallon. “It was bipartisan. If you look at [gay rights pioneer] Frank Kameny, the responses he’d get in the late ‘50s, early ‘60s from Democratic liberals are as hair-raising from right wing Republicans. You are talking about a group [gays] almost entirely friendless, politically.”
After writing a trilogy of political novels—“Watergate,” “Finale” and this year’s “Landfall”—Mallon jokes that he is “pulling a reverse Ronald Reagan and forsaking politics for show business.” His next book, which will be published in 2022, is a novel about real-life gay actor Dick Kallman who was murdered in 1980 at age 46. “It’s a ‘70s New York story; it’s one of these stories that just grabbed hold of me,” Mallon says. Kallman “had some success on Broadway and in television. The novel spans 1951 to 1980 so, in gay terms, you see this character living from Kinsey through the Lavender Scare up through Stonewall and on threshold of AIDS.”
That sound like rich material for an opera, so stay tuned.
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