For much of the last half century, the paranoia and tyranny of the McCarthy era in America has seemed more like a bizarre anomaly than an evil that could easily reappear.
And that story is an old one: virgin meets cad. Timothy Laughlin (tenor Jonas Hacker) is a recent college graduate—an endearingly dorky, devotedly Catholic intern at a D.C. newspaper seeking a future in public policy. A chance meeting with Hawkins Fuller (baritone Joseph Lattanzi)— a dashing Harvard graduate, state department careerist, and serial seducer—lands him a job on a senator’s staff and introduces him to the exhilaration and heartbreak of first love. It’s a familiar plot, but not one usually encountered in opera as boy meets boy. Laughlin’s heartbreak is multifaceted: attributable not only to his lover’s betrayal and a personal religious crisis, but also to a culture of persecution in which survival depends on constant, furtive duplicity.
