Fisher Center Lab Presents the World Premiere of Suddenly Last Summer, Macarthur Fellow Courtney Bryan’s First Work for the Stage, with Libretto by Gideon Lester and Daniel Fish Based on Tennessee Williams’ Play, June 25-July 19

Directed by Fish with Music Direction by Nathan Koci

Part of SummerScape 2026, Suddenly Last Summer is a feverish new chamber opera based on Williams’s tale of power, desire, and the lengths a family will go to protect its legacy

Tickets are currently on sale; for complete information regarding tickets, series discounts, and more, visit fishercenter.bard.edu or call the Fisher Center box office at (845) 758-7900.

Fisher Center LAB presents the world premiere of 2023 MacArthur Fellow and “pianist and composer of panoramic interests” (The New York Times) Courtney Bryan’s Suddenly Last Summer, co-produced by Opera Philadelphia, June 25 – July 19 at the Fisher Center, as part of Bard SummerScape 2026. The opera is composed by Bryan and features a libretto by Fisher Center Artistic Director and Chief Executive Gideon Lester and Tony-nominated director Daniel Fish, based on Tennessee Williams’s seldom performed fever dream of a play. Also serving as stage director of the opera, Fish returns to SummerScape for the production, having a decade ago rocked the festival—and, not long after, Broadway—with his acclaimed reimagining of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, on which he also collaborated with Suddenly Last Summer music director Nathan Koci. Suddenly Last Summer is the first presentation of one of the Fisher Center’s three inaugural Fisher Center LAB Civis Hope Commissions.

Fisher Center LAB this year unites three visionaries in a work that applies the mythic emotional proportions of opera to Tennessee Williams’s twisted psychological storytelling and blistering atmosphere. The opera tells the gripping and troubling story of the wealthy Venable family. The poet Sebastian Venable died mysteriously in Spain last summer. His cousin Catherine—sung by SummerScape favorite Mikaela Bennett (SummerScape: Daniel Fish’s Most Happy in Concert; also with Fish: Acquanetta)—was with him and has since returned to New Orleans, where she obsessively recounts the story of his death. Now, Sebastian’s mother, played by renowned actor Tina Benko (Broadway: The Rose Tattoo; Off-Broadway: A Midsummer Night’s Dream), is attempting to bribe a certain Dr. Cukrowicz, played by Branden Lindsay (Off-Broadway: Merry Wives; Film: Train Dreams), to lobotomize her niece and cut the story from her memory forever. The Young People's Chorus of New York City joins the production as its choral ensemble.

Beyond Bennett, Benko, Lindsay, and Members of the Young People’s Chorus of New York, the production’s full cast is Miriam Silverman (Broadway: The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, Junk) as Mrs. Holly, Nick Westrate (Broadway: Bernhardt/Hamlet, Casa Valentina) as George. The creative team is Nathan Koci (Music Direction and Supervision), Marsha Ginsberg (Scenic Design), Terese Wadden (Costume Design), Stacey Derosier (Lighting Design), Garth MacAleavey (Audio Design and Mixing), Joshua Thorson (Projection Design), Beth Gill (Movement Direction), Bobbie Zlotnik (Hair and Wig Design), Anne Ford-Cotes (Makeup Design), Carter Edwards (Producer), Taylor Williams, CSA (Casting), Mikhaela Mahony (Associate Direction), and Jason Kaiser (Stage Management).

This new take on a lesser-known yet unforgettable work by Williams originated when Fish sent a copy to Lester. On re-reading the play, Lester felt it “had to be sung.” He explains, “As I read the poetry of Williams’s scenes, I thought, ‘this has an opera in it because it's gothic; it's fabulously intense, emotionally, and its language soars.’ Opera, of course, is a form that gives itself to heightened passions, to great drama, to singing what really can't be spoken. We think of Williams’s most famous plays, set in New Orleans and the South, as being representations of real life, but they go far beyond that into the realms of the imagination and the unconscious. Suddenly Last Summer is perhaps the most extreme and glorious example of that. I'd been thinking for some time about approaching the great composer Courtney Bryan to see whether she might want to take her first foray into theater with music. I sent her the play, and I think she was really captivated by it.”

Lester describes the work as “total theater—the intersection of design and music and performance and passion and spoken word.” Bryan then brought her own musical spirit, grounded in the musical traditions of New Orleans, to the interplay between her and Williams’s sensibilities, and sung and spoken drama. To capture the two worlds the play surrounds—the Mediterranean coast and the Garden District of New Orleans—and the ways they act on and build the story, Bryan spent time composing in both locales, including a research visit to her hometown with Lester and Fish. Bryan now premieres her ravishing score inspired by those two environments.

Courtney Bryan, whose introduction to Fish’s work was seeing Oklahoma! and who had been a student of Lester’s at Columbia, said, “I took a collaboration course with Gideon. It's nice that years later, we're collaborating on a professional project. It's interesting to think about a different side of New Orleans than where I grew up, one that I'm only familiar with from the outside; these characters lived in houses in the Garden District of New Orleans that were always a mystery to me. The project has allowed me to think differently about harmony, to get into the emotions behind the characters and the story, and capture the extreme moods of the piece. That was a big part of my draw to the project.”

Daniel Fish said, “Tennessee Williams is writing about violence in American life. There's one woman who has a burning need to tell the truth, and another woman who has another, more insidious need to silence that truth. It’s a crazy, gothic, melodramatic story that is really deeply connected to those themes that Williams was always exploring. And what happens when we put Tennessee Williams’s language, Courtney Bryan's music, Mikaela Bennett’s voice, Tina Benko and Branden Lindsay’s acting, all of this together in one space, in one particular time? That's what I'm interested in.”

Knowing Mikaela Bennett would be performing the role of Catherine—the one principal character who sings, while the others speak—Bryan wrote specifically for her voice. Says Bennett, “I have never had the opportunity to work on something where all the creatives are in the room, working together from square one, and we get to mold the piece around us as artists. Courtney is leaning into what makes me special as an artist who has flexibility around genre. [And with Daniel], I feel really lucky working with a director whom I trust so much, and obviously trusts me as well. There's so much freedom and discovery in the room.”

Suddenly Last Summer is part of the Fisher Center’s summer-long SummerScape 2026 (running June 25 – August 16), bringing eight weeks of opera, dance, Spiegeltent, and the 36th Bard Music Festival to the idyllic Hudson River Valley setting. SummerScape serves as an incubator for adventurous works that often go on to have extended lives and make significant impacts on the performance landscape in New York and around the country and world. This year, in addition to Suddenly Last Summer it includes Lucinda Childs: Momentary Reprise, a program of new and landmark works from the groundbreaking choreographer, June 26–28; a rare staging of Richard Strauss’s opera The Egyptian Helen, with a libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, directed by Christian Räth, with the American Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leon Botstein (July 24 – August 2); the 36th Bard Music Festival: Mozart and His World (August 7–16); and multidisciplinary programming in majestic mirrored Spiegeltent, curated by Jason Collins (June 26 – August 15).

Suddenly Last Summer is presented by special arrangement with The University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee.
 

Suddenly Last Summer Schedule

Critics are welcome as of July 5.
Thursday, June 25 at 7:30 pm
Saturday, June 27 at 7:30 pm
Sunday, June 28 at 3 pm
Tuesday, June 30 at 7:30 pm
Wednesday, July 1 at 3 pm
Friday, July 3 at 3 pm
Sunday, July 5 at 3 pm
Wednesday, July 8 at 3 pm
Thursday, July 9 at 7:30 pm
Saturday, July 11 at 3 pm
Sunday, July 12 at 3 pm
Wednesday, July 15 at 3 pm
Thursday, July 16 at 7:30 pm
Saturday, July 18 at 3 pm
Sunday, July 19 at 3 pm

LUMA Theater

About Courtney Bryan (Composer)
Courtney Bryan, a native of New Orleans, Louisiana, is “a pianist and composer of panoramic interests” (New York Times). She is a Steinway Artist and 2023 MacArthur Fellow, and currently serves as composer-in-residence with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra.
Recent works include DREAMING (Freedom Sounds), performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble at New York’s Kaufman Music Center; Visual Rhythms, a new art-inspired orchestral piece for Jacksonville Symphony; House of Pianos, which Bryan premiered in 2023 with the LA Phil New Music Group (chamber ensemble version) and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (full orchestra version); and Gathering Song (libretto by Tazewell Thompson), composed for bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green and the New York Philharmonic. Bryan’s compositions have been performed by Opera Philadelphia (Composer in Residence, 2022-2024), the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra (Creative Partner, 2020–2023), Jacksonville Symphony (Mary Carr Patton Composer-In-Residence, 2018–2020), London Sinfonietta, LA Phil, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, and Chicago Sinfonietta in a wide range of renowned venues, including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walt Disney Concert Hall, and Blue Note Jazz Club.

Recent accolades include the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts (2018), Samuel Barber Rome Prize in Music Composition (2019–2020), United States Artists Fellowship (2020), and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship (2020–2021). She is the Albert and Linda Mintz Professor of Music at Newcomb College in the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane University. Her music is published by Boosey & Hawkes.

About Daniel Fish (Librettist & Director)
Daniel Fish is a New York-based director who makes work across the boundaries of theater, film, and opera. He draws on a broad range of forms and subject matter, including plays, film scripts, contemporary fiction, essays, and found audio. His acclaimed 2019 production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! transferred to Broadway from St. Ann’s Warehouse, following its premiere at the Fisher Center at Bard, and won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical. The production then transferred to London’s West End, where it won the Olivier Award for Best Musical Revival. Other recent work includes White Noise, inspired by the novel by Don DeLillo (Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen, Theater Freiburg, NYU Skirball Center), Michael Gordon’s opera Acquanetta (Prototype, and also a Fisher Center premiere), Who Left This Fork Here (Baryshnikov Arts Center, Onassis Stegi), Ted Hearne’s The Source (BAM Next Wave, LA Opera, San Francisco Opera).

His work has been seen at theaters and festivals throughout the U.S. and Europe, including the Walker Art Center, PuSh, Teatro Nacional D. Maria II, Lisbon & Estoril Film Festival, Vooruit, Festival TransAmériques, Noorderzon Festival, The Chocolate Factory Theater, The Public Theater’s Under The Radar, Opera Philadelphia/Curtis Opera Theatre, American Repertory Theater, Yale Repertory Theatre, McCarter Theatre, Signature Theatre, The Shakespeare Theater Company, Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, Staatstheater Braunschweig, and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Residencies and commissions include MacDowell, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Mass MoCA, The Chocolate Factory Theater, and LMCC/Governors Island.

He is a graduate of Northwestern University’s Department of Performance Studies and has taught at The Juilliard School, Bard College, Princeton University, and the Department of Design for Stage and Film at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. He is the recipient of the 2017 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts for the Theater, as well as an Obie Award and a Tony nomination.

About Gideon Lester (Librettist and Artistic Director)
Gideon Lester’s previous translations and adaptations for Fisher Center LAB include Molière’s Dom Juan and Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, and at the American Repertory Theatre, Marivaux’s Island of Slaves and The Dispute, Büchner’s Woyzeck, Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, and stage adaptations of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (with Toneelgroup Amsterdam) and Kafka’s Amerika (with Theatre de la Jeune Lune.) The Fisher Center’s Artistic Director and Chief Executive, he is a Tony and Olivier award-winning creative producer, festival director, and dramaturg, and has collaborated with and commissioned a broad range of American and international artists across disciplines. A professor of Theater & Performance at Bard College, he has also taught at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and at Harvard. He was co-curator of Crossing the Line Festival, and Acting Artistic Director and Dramaturg at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, MA.

About the Cast

Mikaela Bennett (Catherine Holly) is a celebrated singer and actress praised for her artistic versatility on stage and in concert halls around the world. She has premiered new compositions by leading composers, including Sarah Kirkland Snider, Derek Bermel, Michael Gordon, and Michael Tilson Thomas. Additional career highlights include her New York City solo recital debut at Alice Tully Hall, her Lyric Opera of Chicago debut in West Side Story (Maria), Ricky Ian Gordon’s The Grapes of Wrath (Rosasharn) with MasterVoices at Carnegie Hall, and Handel’s Israel in Egypt with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s at Carnegie Hall. Bennett is a recipient of the Lincoln Center Award for Emerging Artists and was also named one of WQXR’s “40 Under 40: A New Generation of Superb Opera Singers.”

In the 25/26 season, Bennett makes her LA Opera debut in the world premiere of Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Hildegard (Richardis von Stade), followed by a return to the Prototype Festival in the same production. She also returns to Bard SummerScape for the world premiere of Courtney Bryan’s Suddenly Last Summer (Catherine), an opera written for her. On the concert stage, she debuts at Emerald City Music in a concert featuring the premiere of a new Molly Joyce song cycle and appears with MasterVoices in Fauré’s Requiem and the world premiere of Sins and Grace at Alice Tully Hall. In December 2025, she appeared in Holiday Pops programs with the Grand Rapids, Cincinnati, Toronto, and Edmonton Symphony Orchestras.

In the 24/25 season, Mikaela made her debut at Festival Musica Strasbourg in Ted Hearne’s contemporary oratorio The Source. Additional concert appearances included debuts with the Orlando Philharmonic for Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 under Eric Jacobsen; Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra in an all-Gershwin program; Kansas City Symphony for their Memorial Day concert; and the Baltimore and Nashville Symphony Orchestras in Mary Lou Williams’ Zodiac Suite with the Aaron Diehl Trio. Operatic engagements included her debut at the Prototype Festival in Christopher Cerrone’s In a Grove (Leona Raines/Leona’s Mother) and a return to The Glimmerglass Festival for the world premiere of Derek Bermel and Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (Esperanza), written with her voice in mind. Bennett is a native of Ottawa, Canada, and a graduate of The Juilliard School.

Tina Benko (Mrs. Venable) recently performed on Broadway in Noël Coward’s Fallen Angels and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Appropriate. Other credits include the premieres of David Ives’ Pamela Palmer at Williamstown Theatre Festival, Emily Mann’s adaptation of The Pianist at George Street Playhouse, and Claudia Rankine’s Help at The Shed. Other Broadway includes: The Rose Tattoo, The Crucible, Macbeth, The Cherry Orchard, and Not About Nightingales. Off Broadway includes: Becky Nurse of Salem and Nantucket Sleigh Ride at Lincoln Center, Spindle Shuttle Needle at Clubbed Thumb, Scenes From a Marriage and The Little Foxes both directed by Ivo Van Hove for New York Theatre Workshop, Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day, Rajiv Joseph's Describe The Night, and Daniel Fish's Who Left This Fork Here at Baryshnikov Arts, as well Desdemona/Othella in the international tour of Toni Morrison’s play Desdemona directed by Peter Sellars. Film and TV credits include: Elsbeth (recurring), And Just Like That…, The Betrayers, Worldbuilding, The Rehearsal (Emmy Award/best supporting actress/digital series), Kaleidoscope, Mother, May I Have a Kidney?, Mapplethorpe, Life After You, The Sound of Silence, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, The Scottish Play, Fair Market Value, Turn: Washington’s Spies, The Other Two, FBI, Power Book III: Raising Kanan, Nobody Wants to Shoot a Woman. She is certified in PEM and has taught at Columbia University, Fordham College, HB Studios, Carnegie Mellon, and OnCamJam.

Branden Lindsay (Dr. Cukrowicz) most recently appeared in the Best Picture-nominated Train Dreams. His other film credits include The Greatest Beer Run Ever (dir. Peter Farrelly). Television credits include guest-starring roles on Awkwafina Is Nora from Queens, Blue Bloods, and Evil. On stage, he starred on the national tour of A Soldier’s Play (dir. Kenny Leon). New York stage credits include The Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park production of Merry Wives (dir. Saheem Ali). Regional credits include Mother Road by Octavio Solis at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Branden holds an MFA from New York University and is a native of South Carolina.

About Young People’s Chorus of New York City

YPC is an internationally acclaimed choral ensemble, praised for its virtuosity and brilliant sound by The New York Times. Under the leadership of Founder and Artistic Director Francisco J. Núñez, a MacArthur Fellow and Musical America’s 2018 Educator of the Year, and Creative Director Elizabeth Núñez, the nonprofit organization uplifts over 2,000 young people annually, representing every neighborhood of New York City and empowering children of all backgrounds with a unique program of music education and choral performance that unlocks pathways to success through the arts. Since its inception, YPC has served over 40,000 children.
With repertoire that spans Renaissance and classical traditions through gospel, folk, jazz, pop, contemporary and world music, YPC continually invigorates its catalogue of music for young voices by commissioning hundreds of works from many of the most distinguished and emerging composers of our time.

The organization’s acclaimed artistry inspires invitations for collaborations and performances from a global array of festivals, cultural institutions, and cities throughout the world. Their exceptional performances have been heard in five continents. YPC regularly performs on national radio and television programs including CBS Sunday Morning and has been featured on NBC, ABC, BBC, CCTV, FOX, NHK, PBS, and more. The chorus has competed in international competitions and most recently won 10 gold medals and four world championships during the World Choir Games in Korea 2023 and New Zealand 2024.

YPC's holiday special Topsy Turvy New York won a 66th Annual New York Emmy® Award. Its documentary This Time Round earned awards including "Best Producer" at the Toronto Indie Filmmakers Festival and "Best Soundtrack" at the New York International Film Awards. The documentary’s award-winning soundtrack will be released on a limited-edition vinyl in 2026. YPC recently debuted Out of the Vox, an new YPC Short Film Series.

Beyond performance, the organization provides critical tools for each child to succeed long after they leave YPC. Its College Bound program offers classes ranging from financial literacy to college application coaching, and scholarships for college and comprehensive artistic programs are awarded annually.

Among YPC’s many awards are America’s highest honor for youth programs, a National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award from the White House, an honor from First Lady Laura Bush, and performances before prime ministers, Pope Francis and Pope John Paul. The chorus has received a Chorus America Education Outreach Award, two Chorus America/ ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming and a 2017 Margaret Hillis Award for Choral Excellence.

About the Creative Team

Nathan Koci (Music Direction and Supervision). Broadway: Illinoise, Hadestown (Assoc. MD), Oklahoma! (Dir. Daniel Fish); Off-Broadway: The Seat of Our Pants (Ethan Lipton, Public Theater) Regional/Tour: Hadestown (MD - Nat’l Tour), War Horse (1st Nat. Tour), Most Happy In Concert (Williamstown), Mother Courage and Her Children (Arena Stage); International: The Great Yes, The Great No (William Kentridge), The Head and The Load (William Kentridge); Dance: Principles of Uncertainty (Maria Kalman/John Heginbotham); Opera: Suddenly Last Summer (Courtney Bryan/Daniel Fish), The Source (Ted Hearne/Daniel Fish); Select Recordings: The Hands Free, And Friends, Guy Klucevsek, The Solomon Diaries, Shovels and Rope, The Michael Leonhart Orchestra, The Opposite of a Train.  

Marsha Ginsberg (Scenic Design) is an Obie Award-winning designer celebrated for bold, interdisciplinary work in theatre and opera presented at theaters and museums in the U.S. and Europe. Broadway credits include English, for which she received a Tony nomination. Previously, for Bard SummerScape, she created the scenic design for Leonard Bernstein’s Peter Pan (directed by Christopher Alden) and Love in the Wars (an adaptation of Kleist’s Pentheselia). Recent highlights include Britten’s Midsummer’s Night Dream directed by Ted Huffman, currently being revised at Deutsche Opera Berlin and travelling to Volksoper Vienna; Data (world premiere, Lortel Theatre/Arena Stage), Primary Trust (world premiere, Roundabout Theatre Company, La Jolla Playhouse, Center Theater Group, Los Angeles), English (world premiere, Atlantic Theater Company/Roundabout), The Lehman Trilogy (Guthrie Theater; Shakespeare Theatre Company, Milwaukee Rep), Don Pasquale, Treemonisha (Opera Theatre of Saint Louis), and Letters from Max (world premiere, Signature Theatre). She is a Rome Prize recipient from the American Academy in Rome and has held residencies at MacDowell and Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center. She is an Associate Arts Professor at NYU Abu Dhabi.

Terese Wadden (Costume Design) is a Hudson Valley-based costume designer. Recent credits include Kramer/Fauci (Skirball), directed by Daniel Fish, Korngold’s Die stumme Serenade (Mannes Opera), Die Zauberflöte (Shepard School of Music), Vanessa (Williamstown Theatre Festival), and Giulio Cesare (Hudson Hall). She designed costumes for Kate Soper’s opera The Hunt (Miller Theatre), Candide (Opera de Lyon), Most Happy (Williamstown Theatre Festival), Così fan Tutte (Santa Fe Opera), and the Tony Award-Winning production of Oklahoma! (Broadway, West End, Touring, and St. Ann’s Warehouse), Peter Pan (Bard SummerScape), and Michael Gordon’s Acquanetta (Bard SummerScape and Prototype Festival). Her work has been seen at the Canadian Opera Company, Glimmerglass Festival, Tanglewood, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Chicago Opera Theater, New York City Opera, Opera Colorado, Central City Opera, Portland Opera, Baryshnikov Arts Center, the Mark Taper Forum, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and National Sawdust. She was awarded a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome in 2020-2021.

Stacey Derosier (Lighting Design). Mother Russia & Grangeville (Signature Theatre), Teeth (Playwrights Horizons), The Counter & The Refuge Plays (Roundabout Theatre), The Welkin (Atlantic Theater), All the Devils Are Here (DR2), The Half-God of Rainfall (NYTW), Uncle Vanya (O’Henry), On Set with Theda Bara (Exponential Festival). Obie Design Award 2023, 2018 Lilly Award Daryl Roth Prize.

Josh Thorson (Projection Design) is a New York-based artist and writer. His recent video work for theater includes the St. Ann’s Warehouse and Tony Award-winning Broadway productions of Oklahoma!, which were recognized with an Obie Award and a Drama Desk nomination for Outstanding Projection Design, and his work on the Young Vic and East End productions in London was honored with a What's on Stage Award for Best Video Design in 2023. Thorson has a BA in Cultural Studies and Film Studies from the University of Minnesota—Twin Cities (2001), an MFA in Film/Video from Bard College (2006), and a Ph.D. in Electronic Art at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (2013). He is an Associate Professor of Photography at RIT, where he teaches concepts, theories, and practices of photography and related media. In 2020, he received the Richard & Virginia Eisenhart Provost's Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Garth MacAleavey (Audio Designer) is a theatrical and concert sound designer based in New York. Recent design credits include: What to Wear by Richard Foreman/Michael Gordon at BAM; Primero Sueño a touring processional opera by Paola Prestini; The Gospel at Colonus at Little Island by Lee Breur/Bob Telson; Illinoise on Broadway/Park Ave Armory/Bard SummerScape by Sufjan Stevens/Justin Peck; Black Lodge a touring metal opera by David T. Little; Vail Dance Festival; Song of Songs by David Lang/Pam Tanowitz at Bard SummerScape/The Barbican; Sensorium Ex an Ai and technology based opera about accessibility by Paola Prestini; The Let Go by Nick Cave at the Park Avenue Armory and he is a touring sound designer with the Kronos Quartet. MacAleavey is an expert in modular acoustics, spatial sound, and speaker systems design in conjunction with Meyer Sound’s Constellation and Space Map systems. He is the acting Director of Sound and Technical Design at Brooklyn’s National Sawdust.

Beth Gill (Movement Direction) is an award-winning choreographer working in dance, theater and fashion and based in New York City since 2005. Her own multidisciplinary works are captivating, cinematic timescapes, the product of long-term collaborations with celebrated artists. Gill is the proud recipient of the Herb Alpert, Doris Duke Impact, Foundation for Contemporary Art, and two “Bessie” awards. She has toured nationally and internationally and been honored with (among others): Guggenheim Fellowship, NEFA’s National Dance Project grant, Princeton’s Hodder Fellowship, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Extended Life Artist in Residence.
 

Round-Trip Bus Transportation from New York City

Chartered coach transportation from New York City is available for Suddenly Last Summer on Sunday, July 12.
 

Funding Credits

The Fisher Center is generously supported by Jeanne Donovan Fisher, Rebecca Gold Milikowsky, Daniel Shapiro, Stephen E. Simcock, the Martin and Toni Sosnoff Foundation, Felicitas S. Thorne, the Advisory Board of the Fisher Center, Fisher Center members and general fund donors, The Shubert Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Fisher Center LAB is funded by the Lucille Lortel Foundation and the Fisher Center’s Artistic Innovation Fund, with lead support from Rebecca Gold Milikowsky and additional funding from The William and Lia G. Poorvu Family Foundation. Major development support for Suddenly Last Summer has been received from the Fisher Center’s Hope Commissions Fund, generously endowed by the Civis Foundation and Bard College.

Commissioning support for Suddenly Last Summer was provided by the Howard & Sarah D. Solomon Foundation. The commissioning of Courtney Bryan received funding from OPERA America’s Opera Grants for Women Composers program, supported by the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation. Suddenly Last Summer was developed with residency support from the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM).

About the Fisher Center at Bard
The Fisher Center is a premier professional performing arts center and a hub for research and education that demonstrates Bard College’s commitment to the performing arts as a cultural and educational necessity. To support artists, students, and audiences in the examination of

artistic ideas, the Fisher Center develops, produces, and presents performing arts across disciplines through new productions and context-rich programs that challenge and inspire.

Home is the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, designed by Frank Gehry and located on the campus of Bard College in New York’s Hudson Valley. This world-class theater building will be complemented by a new studio building designed by Maya Lin, scheduled to open in 2026. More than 200 events and 50,000 visitors are hosted at the Fisher Center each year, and over 300 professional artists are employed annually. As a powerful catalyst of art-making regionally, nationally, and worldwide, the Fisher Center produces 8 to 10 major new works in various disciplines every year. The Fisher Center offers outstanding programs to many communities, including the students and faculty of Bard College, and audiences in the Hudson Valley, New York City, across the country, and around the world. Building on a 166-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders.

The Fisher Center was born from the Bard Music Festival, founded in 1990, which, for the first 13 years of its existence, occupied several spaces on campus, including a large tent. Each summer, the Music Festival focuses on the life, work, and influences of one composer, promoting new ways of understanding and presenting the history of music to a contemporary audience. When the Fisher Center and its two theaters opened in 2003, the summer festival expanded to include a fully staged opera, as well as theater and dance performances. The highly acclaimed opera program brings unjustly neglected works to the stage in major productions—often making their U.S. debuts.

Through Fisher Center LAB, the Center’s acclaimed residency and commissioning program, artists are provided with custom-made support toward their innovative projects, and their work has been seen in over 100 communities around the world. Resident choreographer Pam Tanowitz’s 2018 Four Quartets was recognized as “the greatest creation of dance theater so far this century” by The New York Times. In 2019, the Fisher Center won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical for Daniel Fish’s production of Oklahoma!, which began life in 2007 as an undergraduate production at Bard and was produced professionally by the Fisher Center in 2015 before transferring to New York City. Illinoise, a 2023 Fisher Center world premiere from artists Sufjan Stevens, Justin Peck, and Jackie Sibblies Drury, was recognized with a Tony Award for Best Choreography following its tour and transfer to Broadway.

The Fisher Center is home to several of Bard’s academic programs in the performing arts. Year-round, it hosts performances by the undergraduate Dance Program and Theater and Performance Program; the US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music;

The Orchestra Now (TŌN), a Bard graduate program that is training the next generation of classical-music ambassadors; and students at the Bard Conservatory, the first (and so far only) conservatory to require all its students to pursue a bachelor of arts degree in a field other than music in addition to their specialized music studies. As a hybrid institution, the Fisher Center brings together professional and academic art-making of the highest caliber, where student and professional artists work side by side, learning from each other and informing one another’s practices.

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This event was last updated on 04-16-2026

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