Hope may seem daring in this age of angst and uncertainty, but it is at the heart of three major new works coming to the Fisher Center at Bard, including a musical adaptation of “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,” the performing arts center announced on Tuesday.
With a $2.5 million gift from the Civis Foundation, matched by Bard College for an initial endowment of $5 million, the Fisher Center said it would create the Civis Hope Commissions, a program to support “contemporary artists who will examine, interrogate and transform American artifacts, archival materials or artworks from the past to imagine a more perfect, just and hopeful future.”
Gideon Lester, the Fisher Center’s artistic director and chief executive, described the program in an interview as “a rallying cry for the possibility of art.”
“Art can describe things as they might be,” he said, “and see things not only as they are framed by the current news cycle. Great art has the ability to shift our consciousness and show us what we might become if we were really inhabiting our best selves. That’s what these commissions are really about.”
The Civis Hope Commissions are intended to continue in perpetuity, but the Fisher Center announced three projects to start: “Jubilee,” a new musical with a libretto by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, based on Scott Joplin’s opera “Treemonisha”; Courtney Bryan’s first opera, an adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s “Suddenly Last Summer”; and the “Yentl” musical, which will be the celebrated director Barrie Kosky’s first project developed in the United States.
These commissions had already been in the works at the Fisher Center, but were chosen for the Civis program because they fit its mandate, Lester said, adding that working under the Civis umbrella allowed him and the artists “an opportunity to think about them in a new way.”
“Jubilee,” directed by Steve H. Broadnax III, will be presented in a semi-staged early version at Bard’s SummerScape festival this year. It is the latest effort to adapt Joplin’s 1910 ragtime opera, which never premiered in the composer’s lifetime and always requires some degree of modern intervention.
Bryan’s adaptation of “Suddenly Last Summer” will have a libretto by Lester and Daniel Fish, who will also direct. Fish was behind one of the Fisher Center’s biggest hits, the well-traveled sexy, dark revival of “Oklahoma!,” which was first presented at SummerScape a decade ago.
Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy” is best known from Barbra Streisand’s liberal film adaptation from 1983. This new version, with a book and lyrics by Lisa Kron (“Fun Home”) and a score by Adam Benzwi, a longtime Kosky collaborator, will be more of a return to the source material, with a style rooted in Yiddish theater and music hall traditions. Kosky, one of the busiest and most beloved stage directors in Europe, has had projects travel to the United States, but this will be his first production built from scratch on American soil.
“When you put these projects next to each other, patterns start to emerge,” Lester said. “It’s not polemical, but they all turn out to be stories about strong women who are challenging the status quo.”
T. Eric Galloway, the president of Civis, took an even broader view in a statement, saying that these commissions reflect the foundation’s belief “in the power of performance to activate our shared connection and to spark cross-boundary conversations that lead to personal fulfillment through, not despite, others.”
