What emerged from months of research was a complicated tapestry of relationships about — but never focused on — women. The willpower of the patriarch permeates everything, despite the population demographics (polygamy, practically, requires that there be many more women than men). The women’s stories mirror the narrative of the American expansion westward and all of the political and emotional worries surrounding an adolescent nation.

The debates about polygamy stretch back to the origins of all three Abrahamic religions — Sarah allowed Abraham to take her servant, Hagar, as a sanctioned mistress (a wife, in the Islamic tradition). Arguments against gay marriage in modern America often use polygamy as an inevitable endpoint at the bottom of the slippery slope. All of these arguments are still playing out in the newspapers and on TV: who determines how a family is composed? Should individual states have different definitions of marriage? What is the role of the federal government in any of this?

Stephen constructed a story around a family of women, all in a complicated dance with a single man and with one another. Two of the women — Eliza and Ruth — are in crisis, and each tries to escape the situation in her own way. The other women establish emotional and practical coping strategies — brave and tragic and submissive and aggressive and subtle and pointed.

I wanted to give each woman her own musical world within a more homogenous choral texture; many times, the women sing in a traditional ensemble way, and other times, they repeat small fragments of text in their own time — little mantras to keep the household together. Almera, the true believer, sings in a radiant, descant-like way; Ruth, wracked with grief, sings in a kind of broken folksong, whereas Lucinda, a teenage girl, sings actual hymn tunes which transform into an adult severity at the end of Act II. The orchestra represents, at times, the wonderfully severe landscape in southern Utah — sharp cliffs, a pervasive red dust, and the night sky.

SYNOPSIS

DARK SISTERS follows one woman’s dangerous attempt to escape her life as a member of the FLDS Church (Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints), a sect that split from mainstream Mormonism in the early 20th Century largely because of the LDS Church’s renunciation of polygamy. The male founders of the Mormon faith (Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, chief among them) loom large in American history; Dark Sisters puts the women front and center.
The narrative draws inspiration from the flurry of media attention surrounding the two most infamous raids on FLDS compounds (the 1953 raid at Short Creek, AZ and the 2008 raid at the YFZ Ranch in Eldorado, TX) as well as the stories of the over 80 wives of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. Set against a red-earthed landscape filled with revelations, dark prophets and white temples stretching towards heaven, Dark Sisters charts one woman’s quest for self-discovery in a world where personal identity is forbidden.

CAST

Eliza: lyric (or spinto) soprano
Zina: lyric coloratura soprano
Almera: spinto (or dramatic) soprano
Presendia: dramatic mezzo-soprano
Ruth: contralto or dramatic mezzo soprano
Prophet/King: bass or bass-baritone
Lucinda: light lyric (or lyric coloratura) soprano

In March 2001 in an English industrial city, before widespread use of the internet, Detective Anne Strawson is given a case she does not want: Jake, 14, has been stabbed in the heart and remains comatose; Brian, 16, stands accused but maintains his innocence. He regales Anne with a preposterous narrative, claiming to have been ensnared online in a web of outrageous and melodramatic characters including wealthy, beautiful Rebecca, 17, her genius brother, Jake, their “Aunt” Fiona, a professional spy, and Peter, their mentally deranged gardener and private assassin in Fiona’s employ. Convinced that Brian is stalling by inventing such outrageous fictions, Anne pushes for Brian to confess to the crime, but Brian vehemently defends his tortured tale. Losing patience, Anne requisitions the boy’s computer from his clueless parents and asks her boss to obtain transcripts of Brian’s online chats to put an end to the nonsense.

At home with her invalid mother, Anne shares that Brian is the very age Anne’s child, given up for adoption at birth, would be today. She cannot bear to think of the kind of life her son must be facing. She and her mother review the security tape from the shopping centre where the stabbing occurred. There is no evidence of any assailant other than Brian. Anne confronts Brian with this and he startles her by revealing the fact that she knows less than nothing about internet life. Anne doesn’t even own a computer. Brian tells her how deeply he loved Rebecca and how agonized he was to learn of her rape and murder at the hands of Peter. Brian believes she was killed for helping her little brother investigate the high-level spy ring of “Aunt” Fiona.

Visiting Jake’s mother at his hospital bed, Anne asks if Jake has a sister Rebecca, and is told that he does and she has not been seen for some time. Jake’s mother also confirms that she has a best friend Fiona. Anne is then confronted with the transcriptions of Brian’s online chats, all confirming the stories he has been telling her. He is inventing nothing.

Act II

Alone in her office in the middle of the night, Anne reviews the evidence from every possible angle: how is such a crime possible? She asks her boss to help comb the morgues to see if Rebecca’s body has turned up, and to contact M15 about “Aunt” Fiona. Anne apologizes to Brian for not believing him and asks to be shown a chat room. For the first time she begins to hear the music that so intoxicates Brian. She makes him finish his testimony, in which Brian is approached online by both Fiona and Peter. When Jake shows up at Brian’s home seeking refuge, Brian takes the younger boy in and the two have sex before Brian vehemently rejects the boy. Soon after, Fiona offers Brian a large sum of money to assassinate Jake; at first he refuses. Anne, realizing she has forgotten about her mother because of her obsession with this case, rushes home to find her mother fast asleep. Anne explodes with frustration: she feels a failure in all regards and is glad she did not have an opportunity to destroy her child. Anne’s mother makes a chance remark that leads to Anne’s beginning to solve the case. Rushing back to the office, she listens to Brian explain how Jake was found to be dying of a rare brain cancer, and so Brian chose to accept Fiona’s offer and kill Jake. Brian meets the boy in a secluded area and stabs him.

Anne returns to the hospital, where comatose Jake is found to be brain dead and is to be taken off all life support. Looking on Jake’s computer, Anne finds the evidence of all the online monikers Jake indeed created: Rebecca, Fiona, Peter. She hears the voices of the characters he invented and she thinks of the children lost because of parents who fail to hear and see them, to love them, to keep them close. She has solved the case and is left with the image of so many children, “gone for now,” perhaps even the child she gave up at birth.

—CRAIG LUCAS

CAST
Principals
ANNE, a detective, 50’s: Alto
BRIAN, 16: Tenor
REBECCA, 18: Soprano
BOY, 12: Boy Soprano
FIONA, 35, a spy: Mezzo-Soprano
JAKE, 15: Baritone
PETER, 28: Bass

Other Characters
BRIAN’S MOTHER: Mezzo-Soprano
BRIAN’S FATHER: Bass
WOMAN (Jake’s Mother): Mezzo-Soprano
MARK FOLEY, Representative from Florida: Tenor
CONGRESSIONAL PAGE: Tenor
LORI DREW: Soprano
MEGAN MEIERMegan Meier: Soprano
PRECENTOR OF THE CHURCH: Tenor

Chorus of internet users, churchgoers, shoppers, citizens.