Composer: John Glover
Librettist: Kelley Rourke
Music Director and Pianist: Mila Henry
Directed and Developed by: Kristin Marting
Author and Reader: Dana Spiotta
Performances by: Amy Justman, Paul Chwe MinChul An, and Natalie Trumm
Join us to celebrate the live album release of Eat the Document, an opera by John Glover and Kelley Rourke, based on the acclaimed novel by Dana Spiotta. In addition to samples of the recording, the evening will feature live performances by original cast members, readings from the book, and a reception.
The album will be released on May 22 on Bright Shiny Things.
In the heyday of the seventies underground, Bobby DeSoto and Mary Whittaker—passionate, idealistic, and in love—design a series of increasingly radical protests against the Vietnam War. When one action goes wrong, the course of their lives is forever changed. The two must erase their past, forge new identities, and never see each other again. Now it is the 1990s. Mary lives in the suburbs with her fifteen-year-old son, Jason, who spends hours immersed in the music of his mother’s generation. She has no idea where Bobby is, whether he is alive or dead. A few towns away, an aging anarchist calling himself Nash presides over a bookstore/infoshop, drawing the disaffected youth of the next generation into a series of “groups” and “collectives.” Shifting between the protests in the 1970s and the consequences of those choices in the 1990s, Eat the Document explores the connection between the two eras—their language, technology, music, and activism. Recorded live at HERE during the 2025 PROTOTYPE Festival, Eat the Document was developed in collaboration with Mila Henry and Kristin Marting. This project was developed in part during a Baryshnikov Arts Residency.
All details subject to change.
John Glover (Composer), described as “an unabashedly expressive composer,” (The New Yorker) has created music for concert, opera, dance, and theater. He has received commissions from artists and organizations including Adam Tendler, Sasha Cooke, Kelly Bartnik, Houston Grand Opera, On Site Opera, American Composers Orchestra, The New York Youth Symphony, Washington National Opera, Milwaukee Opera Theatre, American Conservatory Theater, Mirror Visions Ensemble, and the Five Boroughs Music Festival. His work has been presented in venues ranging from Rockwood Music Hall to CarnegieHall, The Invisible Dog to the Rothko Chapel. He frequently collaborates with librettists Kelley Rourke and Erin Bregman. In addition to his work as a composer, Glover serves as the Director of Artistic Planning for Kaufman Music Center focusing on programming a range of musical artists and creating connections across generations of music and art makers.
Kelley Rourke (Librettist) has collaborated with composers including John Glover (Eat the Document, Right Now, Lucy, and Stay); Wang Lu (The Beekeeper); Kenji Oh (The Emissary); Kamala Sankaram (Jungle Book); Laura Karpman (Wilde Tales and And Still We Dream); Ben Moore (Odyssey and Robin Hood); Zach Redler (A River Runs Through It) and Christopher Tin (O’Keeffe: Kiss the Sky). Her work has been commissioned and performed by the Metropolitan Opera, English National Opera, Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Opera Australia, Welsh National Opera, Washington National Opera, PROTOTYPE Festival, The Glimmerglass Festival, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Opera Parallèle, Chicago Opera Theater, Carnegie Hall, and Opera Montana, among many others. Rourke is the recipient of Opera America’s 2024 Campbell Opera Librettist Prize and two NYSCA commissioning grants.
Dana Spiotta (Author/Reader) is the author of five novels: Wayward, a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of the Year; Innocents and Others (2016), winner of the St. Francis College Literary Prize and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Stone Arabia (2011), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Eat the Document (2006), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the American Academy’s Rosenthal Foundation Award; and Lightning Field (2001), a New York Times Notable Book. Other awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, the Rome Prize in Literature, the Premio Pivano, a Creative Capital Award, and the John Updike Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Photo by Maria Baranova.