Director's Statement by Kevin Newbury

Kevin Newbury, Stage Director of Fellow Travelers. © Marcus Shields

In the 2025/26 season, Seattle Opera will present Fellow Travelers, one of the most frequently performed new operas of the past decade, in collaboration with New York-based artistic collective Up Until Now, as part of a national project that brings this important story to stages across the country. This special initiative, which is launching in Seattle, is one of the largest consortium projects within the US opera industry and is headed by director Kevin Newbury (The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs ’19) and producer Jecca Barry.

COMMUNITY, ACTIVISM, AND OPERA: A DECADE OF FELLOW TRAVELERS

On June 12, 2016, forty-nine LGBTQ+ people were killed at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, FL. That same night, I was enjoying a drag show at Oz, a Queer nightclub in downtown Cincinnati, with a dozen members of the Fellow Travelers cast and crew, which was scheduled to premiere six days later. The next morning, as news of the tragedy spread through the Cincinnati Opera company, we felt a sense of collective mourning and reflection: What if some of us hadn’t survived our trip to Oz the previous night? It was a poignant moment in the early history of this opera.

The massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, FL, happened six days before the world premiere of Fellow Travelers. A temporary memorial was set up soon after.

But I should back up first. In 2007, my dear friend, producer G. Sterling Zinsmeyer, handed me a copy of Tom Mallon’s brand-new novel Fellow Travelers, proclaiming: “This must be an opera, and you need to direct it.” I tore through the book and fell in love with the protagonists, Timothy and Hawkins, while learning about a painful chapter of LGBTQ+ history for the first time.  Sterling was right. It needed to be an opera.  

We got right to work, securing the rights from Tom and bringing on a brilliant writing team: composer Gregory Spears and librettist Greg Pierce. Cincinnati Opera offered to host a workshop of the opera in 2013 and, upon experiencing the finished work, the company offered to present the world premiere. Cincinnati Opera’s support of Fellow Travelers was unwavering and courageous, especially since Cincinnati was perhaps best known, at least in Queer circles, for the force with which it censored Robert Mapplethorpe’s “obscene” gay photographs in 1990. The thought of premiering an opera that featured two gay men singing an achingly beautiful love duet while simulating sex onstage felt like cosmic restitution. 

Cover of The Perfect Moment, a catalogue of black and white photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, published in 1988/1989 to coincide with the exhibition of the same name.
© Institute of Contemporary Art/University of Pennsylvania

Gay in Small Town Maine 

In 1996—my senior year of high school—I wrote a thesis on photographer Robert Mapplethrope, the National Endowment for the Arts, obscenity laws, and Queer artmaking at the height of the AIDS crisis. Our assignment was to write about someone who had shaped culture. My first instinct was to write about Madonna, but my English teacher, Mrs. Ackerman, suggested that my knowledge of Madonna’s trajectory was, perhaps, already encyclopedic. Was there another subject that might really challenge me? While writing about Mapplethorpe and the 1990s culture wars, I was simultaneously terrified that I would die of AIDS, coming out of the closet, and grateful that the local public library in my hometown of Auburn, ME, had a copy of Mapplethorpe’s retrospective catalogue Perfect Moment, on the shelves—flowers, phalluses, and all. I must have renewed that book at least three times.

As a closeted teenager, I never could have imagined that I would forge a career directing LGBTQ+ stories, especially an opera. In the decade since our premiere, Fellow Travelers has had sixteen productions from America’s biggest cities to her heartland. It’s become part of the operatic canon and served as a catalyst for connecting thousands of audience members from many disparate backgrounds, across many generations. Without fail, dozens of audience members congregate in the lobby after each performance, hugging, crying, and sharing their stories until the theater’s curfew. 

A New Coming Out 

The Fellow Travelers Project, a series of performances taking place over the next two years, is a sort of new coming out of this opera. It coincides with our nation’s semiquincentennial. And the opera has become a symbol of resistance to the moment we are in, as we see a dramatic rise in systemic attacks on the rights of LGBTQ+ people in the US and deliberate attempts to erase our history. Conservative federal and local governments are policing gender expression and free speech, abandoning HIV research, challenging the ban on conversion therapy, and hijacking our cultural institutions in Washington DC.

Alongside the national tour we are launching the Lavender Names Project, a collaboration with the new American LGBTQ+ Museum, which officially opens in New York City in Fall, 2027 in a collaboration with The New York Historical. The Lavender Names Project is a grassroots archival research/community outreach initiative, which will uncover and collect photos and stories of victims of the LGBTQ+ community who were systematically discriminated against, fired, and mistreated by federal and local governments, from the ban on gay soldiers serving in World War II to the beginning of the “Lavender Scare” in 1953 to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in the 1990s, and all the way to today. The photos themselves are a part of an ever-growing visual archive that appears onstage at the end of each performance as a living memorial to the many queer people who suffered—and are suffering—the decades-long persecution. The collected names and photos archives will eventually find a home in the American LGBTQ+ Museum. We invite all audiences in Seattle to contribute to this archive leading up to and throughout the performances.

Despite our government’s efforts to erase LGBTQ+ history, our legacy is everywhere I look and that legacy is a groundswell. More than ever, I feel driven to honor the generations of queer folks who came before us and I am also looking to them for guidance, for blueprints.

I recently unearthed my Mapplethorpe thesis in a filing box in my parents’ basement labeled “Kevin: High School.” Reading it for the first time in almost thirty years, the 1990s culture wars now feel like a mere harbinger of much worse things to come. Soon after reading the thesis, Florida officials, under the cover of night, painted over the rainbow crosswalk memorial honoring the Pulse nightclub victims in Orlando. But no one is going to erase us. And no one is going to erase the living, singing memorial that is the Fellow Travelers opera. We will be performing all over this country, our country, throughout next year and beyond, and I can’t think of a better city than Seattle to launch the next chapter in our Fellow Travelers story. Please find me in the lobby after the show to share your own story.

Fellow Travelers opens February 21, 2026, at McCaw Hall. Learn more at seattleopera.org/fellowtravelers.