Standing Her Ground

To create the libretto for Standing Her Ground, I adapted the libretto Mark Medoff wrote for the opera Sara McKinnon. Medoff asked me to compose the music for Sara McKinnon. I had experience writing librettos, and I suggested numerous changes to make it more suitable for singing.

After seeing productions of Sara McKinnon at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces and the University of Colorado in Boulder, Medoff and I agreed the opera would be improved if it were shorter and more focused. I created an outline of a potential reworking, but Mark had never written from an outline, and he said he never would. He preferred to just sit down and write. Unfortunately, his reworked libretto was longer and more complex than before.

At that point he realized my work habits were better suited to shortening the libretto, and he suggested I take over the process. Samples of my initial effort were workshopped at Utah Festival Opera as A Rose in Flames in 2015. Mark directed the staging, and the response to this workshop was favorable. Sadly, Mark was soon battling cancer and he passed away in 2019.

I put the work aside for a couple of years. Then librettist Mark Campbell kindly agreed to read the libretto and offer his thoughts. He felt the libretto was worth reworking, but pointed out some concerns. He suggested I ask permission from the estate to revise the work, which was granted.

Librettist Kelley Rourke also read the libretto. She raised concerns about elements of the work that might prove problematical in the wake of particular 21st-century cultural changes. She was particularly put off by the plot’s casual use of disturbing trauma drama as a backstory device, a practice has been increasingly criticized as a facile cliché.

I shared these concerns, and to rework the story, I decided I would wanted advice from a dramaturg working in opera. Mark Campbell suggested I hire Kate Pitt, a young dramaturge working in New York City, to help me rethink the libretto. We set up a Zoom meeting, and I immediately enjoyed working with her. Over several months we had more than ten hours of Zoom meetings. After each meeting I would write make changes based on her insightful questions and suggestions, and a greatly reconfigured libretto emerged. I’ve titled the new libretto Standing Her Ground.

Some radical changes

This adaptation is radically different from Medoff’s original libretto. A few comparisons will illustrate. My adaptation of the libretto:

• Reduces the number of named characters (from 18 to 8).
• Reduces the number of scenes (from 17 to 7). I added three new scenes to Standing Her Ground, so 13 scenes were cut from the original.
• Cuts the number of words by more than 50%.
• Changes numerous words and phrases to make them better suited to singing.
• Changes the name and backstory of every character who is retained:
• The original protagonist Sara McKinnon becomes Alice Wingate, the niece of the marshal of an old West town marshal (rather than his wife). Sara had grown up in India — Alice grew up in North Carolina.
• Doctor Felipe Delarosa was widowed, childless, regarded as a catch, and had a "friendly" relationship with Miss Lily, the whorehouse madam (a character I cut). In Standing Her Ground, Doctor Diego de la Rosa is an unattached, never-married bachelor.
• The villainous Florentino Ralston traveled with three other marauding outlaws. He becomes Victor Ralston, a train robber who travels alone.
• The Mayor’s wife becomes Maria, Diego's older sister.
• A new character, Emma Thomas, aged 18, is the daughter of the Mayor and his wife, and thus Diego's niece.
• In Standing Her Ground I eliminated some historically implausible elements (such as Sara becoming marshal of a Western town in 1875).
• I eliminated having brutal trauma-drama backstories for Alice Wingate. These plot devices felt particularly problematical and clichéd in a stage work where some character had to tell them.