Poet Maggie Dubris and Composer Andy Teirstein are creating a new opera, Broke.
In each person’s life, there are decisions that change everything. In 1896, Irish farm-girl Katie Henry got on a ship to America to make a new life. In 1983, Nikki Owen took a job as a paramedic in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen. Katie Henry went on to found St. Clare’s hospital during the depths of the Depression. Nikki Owen worked on the St. Clare’s ambulance for 25 years, through the AIDS crisis, the years of crack and homelessness, and the attack on the World Trade Center. Broke is the story of those women, and the people who made St. Clare’s the eternally strange, always broke, but unfailingly kindhearted hospital that it was. In essence, the piece is a love song to a hospital that attended to the poor when other hospitals would not. We see its rise through the 20th century and its demise into rubble and, finally, condos, in the 2000s. Nikki and Katie are two women separated by a hundred years, but joined by their struggle to find their place in a world commandeered by men.
Audio from Broke: Scene Two “The Horse Caper” Recorded spring 2024
Mid-1980s. Paramedics Nikki and Felice (Erin Stewart, Joy Jan Jones) bend the rules to give morphine to a fallen carriage horse in Times Square. Their medical director (David Dewitt) oversees it all.
Two Scenes From A Black-box Video Shoot Summer 2023
Scenes from an early rehearsal
Filmed in the spring of 2021, we documented the process of beginning to rehearse two scenes (without choreography).
Audio from Broke
Act One, Scene 10
Recorded during a three-day rehearsal intensive in August, 2021. Directed and Choreographed by Donald Byrd. Featuring Donald Jones, Jr. as Tex, the Octopus, Erin Stewart as Nikki and Taprena Augustine as Felice.