BROTHER was a collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Del Tredici, who had set a series of my poems to music. It is a song cycle for vocalist and piano, ajourney through vignettes of a gay man’s life. The texts, which include 4 of my own, also utilized David’s settings of texts by Alan Ginsberg, Jaime Manrique and Paul Monette. The focus of this work was primarily on love––desired, gained, lost, mused on, murdered. Our goal was to bring to theatrical life the relationship between piano, singer, music and words, in the quest to understand what it means to be a man.

Story, choreography, direction, lyrics by John Kelly
music by David Del Tredici
additional lyrics by Allan Ginsberg, Paul Monette and Jaime Manrique
set design by Scott Pask
Produced by Alyce Dissette for John Kelly Performance.

Workshop production: Yale Repertory Theater, Yale University, New Haven, CT, March 2001. Premiere: Performance Space 122, NY, May 2001.

WITH: John Kelly (vocals/performance); David Del Tredici (piano).