About a year ago my good friend and talented filmmaker, Jeffrey K. Miller, decided to check an old gmail account he had left dormant for years. Before deleting his entire spam box, Jeff decided to scan through it for anything important that might have accidentally ended up as spam. To his great surprise he found about a hundred emails from a popular online dating site addressed to himself, Jeffrey K. Miller. This was curious. Jeff had never registered for this particular site, or any other online dating service. Yet, here they were, 100 emails documenting every single correspondence of Jeffrey K. Miller within the dating site: every email sent and received, every poke, wink, blink, chat, and even all the spamy legal messages containing privacy policies, updates, warnings and alerts. Puzzled and intrigued Jeffrey and myself poured through the correspondence. What we discovered was astounding. In the pages and pages of electronic communications a story unfolded of love, betrayal, lying, cheating, and unfulfilled longing. Through some miracle of the internet this other Jeffrey K. Miller had left us a meticulous record of his tragic amorous affairs. We knew instantly this was a gift, a rare case of creative gold falling from the sky. We set out to write an opera.
Of course, it takes a while to write an opera. Last spring I workshoped a scene, just to try things out and experiment with the material. It went well. Now we’ve stepped back and we are crafting a full libretto from the collection of emails. By Fall 2010 I should have a handful of piano/vocal scenes, perhaps with some scenes fully scored (and…perhaps…a few of those will turn up on a very exciting concert that might happen in October 2010, but more on that later).
Anyway, below is the scene I wrote last spring. I’m excited by a lot of the material. Dramatically, the scene doesn’t really have a context. Most likely it wont exist in it’s entirety in the final version, but bits and pieces will likely turn up. I’ve also reconsidered my use of speaking. I’m quite liberal with the speech in this scene; however, ideally I want the speaking to be far less frequent, and to fulfill some kind of specific dramatic function when it does happen.