Queering the Classics

Edge

Cleveland, OH

It took nearly 300 years for an openly trans woman to appear in a leading role on the U.S. opera stage. Lucia Lucas, a professional opera singer who is trans, became the first when she starred in the title role of "Don Giovanni'' at Tulsa Opera in 2019. Lucas played the role dressed as a man with her baritone voice, as conventionally written, and like she has many others. Her ability and willingness to play traditional roles in a classical way have been essential to forging a sustainable and successful career.

"You can't force the entire business to change for you," Lucas tells EDGE. "When I came out, friends and colleagues said, 'What are you going to do now?' I said, 'Did I say I was going to quit?' With each performance, I don't hope to break ground, but normalize people whose identities don't necessarily line up with the characters they play on stage. The shift in mentality is the change I hope to inspire as it is more lasting than one performance."

While the live arts have always been associated with queerness, from the prevalence of queer creators and fans to certain traditions of gender play on stage, explicitly trans characters or same-sex love, for example, are all but entirely absent from canonical texts.

Increasingly, that's starting to change. Over the past 10 years, a growing number of queer-inclusive interpretations of classic works have been filling up season calendars. These deliberately imaginative revivals perform a corrective function, reinstating queer people into cultural contexts where they were previously — and inaccurately — erased.

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For Chicago Opera Theater, making the art form more inclusive and reflective of the modern world has become an artistic mission. "I strongly believe that the greatest works of art or literature are the ones that we have the ability to keep reinterpreting again and again," the company's music director, Lidiya Yankovskaya, tells EDGE.

This fall, that meant a presentation of "Carmen" starring queer mezzo Jamie Barton in the title role and Stephanie Blythe, as her tenor alter ego Blythely Oratonio, in the part of Don José. "Jamie in many ways embodies what Carmen is today," Yankovskaya says. "She is someone who's really vocal about her sexuality and gay rights, who is very much herself and refuses to be placed in a box or told by society how she should look or act," qualities she brought to her characterization.

Fresh interpretations like these are essential to the future of the form, Yankovskaya says. "That's what makes these works last; they are not dogmatic or specific to a very narrow period of time or cultural place."

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Incorporating queer people into stories that we repeatedly tell about our culture isn't just essential to progress for LGBTQ+ people. It's essential to the future of art.

"We have a responsibility, all other things aside, to start from scratch and to rethink what these works are capable of," Yankovskaya says of canonical texts. "Because opera focuses on emotional impact, in many ways it's more capable than often other art forms of really helping us to feel kinship to the characters on the stage," she says. "Even if we're nothing like them."