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“I’ve always said, intuitively, that when I see multiple productions of a play I’ve written and those productions work well, that it’s because the actors are hitting the right notes.”
– Tammy Ryan

Tammy Ryan – award-winning playwright, longtime Dramatists Guild member and former regional rep for the Pittsburgh region – has had two of the busiest years of her career. This cascade began in 2012, when she won the American Theatre Critics Association Francesca Primus Prize for her heart-wrenching play Lost Boy Found at Whole Foods. The drama was developed by the New Harmony Project, and received its world premiere in a co-production at Premiere Stages and Playwrights Theater of New Jersey.

Her success can be credited in part to her prodigious work ethic (born in NYC, she’s lived in Pittsburgh for over twenty years and embodies the steel city’s relentless industriousness) and in part to her ability to artistically craft plays whose raw, emotional naturalism is so authentic that audiences feel like voyeurs.

This year, Ms. Ryan embarks on an adventure in new stylistic territory with the premiere of her first opera: A New Kind of Fallout, a commission from Pittsburgh Opera Theater. Ms. Ryan’s assignment was to write a libretto inspired by Rachel Carson’s seminal environmental sciences text Silent Spring. The opera’s protagonist, Alice, is married to a chemical company executive. A wife and mother, Alice experiences an activist awakening after reading Carson’s fiery polemic against irresponsible industrial practices. Ryan elucidates: “There’s an idea of drifting, like how the pesticides drift. When Alice takes the corporations to court she says, ‘A thought can drift too, through generations.’ She says words can drift through human consciousness and eventually change how people think.”

As a first-time librettist there were some pretty serious challenges. “I didn’t know how to write words that people can sing. [Pittsburgh Opera Theater] told me that it takes three times longer to sing a line in opera than it does to say a line. I knew the script had to be shorter. But how do you tell a story that would normally take two hours to tell in 50 pages, versus 120?”

Luckily Ms. Ryan’s collaborator, composer Gilda Lyons, encouraged her to write as long a piece as she needed. Ms. Lyons then worked with Ms. Ryan to re-shape the text to suit the form, cutting certain sections and creating repetitions with others. “It’s brilliant. It’s great. We understood together what we were doing. It’s really one of the best collaborations I’ve ever had,” Ms. Ryan enthuses.

But how does a playwright whose writing is based in realism and naturalism adapt her own style to the larger-than-life world of opera?

“The music elevates the text to this level you cannot even fathom. It adds so much emotion. In this opera, the music is the subtext. If the singers sing the notes, it’s going to be perfectly expressed in terms of the way Gilda and I expected it. Gilda read my lines, understood the subtext, and then composed the notes that would allow the singers to sing it in the exact way to communicate that emotion.”

In this way, Ms. Ryan concludes her approach aligns well with opera, in that both are governed by emotion. She explains, “This is a very personal, naturalistic story. In opera there’s room for big emotion. In theater you’re writing to engage audiences emotionally. My work is not intellectual, it’s emotional and there’s a fit there, I think, with opera. I’m definitely going to keep writing plays, but I will write another opera. It’s thrilling. It’s thrilling to be in the room and hear those voices; to be in the room and hear those voices singing.”

Tammy Ryan is a playwright and now, a librettist. Molly’s Hammer will have its world premiere at The Repertory Theater of St. Louis in March 2016. Lost Boy Found in Whole Foods will be produced at the Portland Stage Company and the Omaha Community Playhouse in 2015-2016 season and Soldier’s Heart will be produced at Clockwise Theater in September.

gcody@dramatistsguild.com