The Creators
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Eric Sawyer, Composer
The music of Eric Sawyer receives frequent performances on both coasts, including at New York’s Weill and Merkin concert halls and at Tanglewood, as well as in England, France, and China. Sawyer’s opera Our American Cousin was premiered in 2008 by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and released on the BMOP/sound label. A second opera, The Garden of Martyrs, received its premiere from the Springfield Symphony in September 2013, and was honored with The American Prize. A third, The Scarlet Professor, was presented in an initial workshop in June 2015. Other recent works including Fantasy Concerto: Concord Conversations, composed for the piano trio Triple Helix and the Concord Orchestra. A chamber collection String Works and the cantata The Humble Heart are available on CD from Albany Records. Sawyer has received the Joseph Bearns Prize, awards from the Tanglewood Music Center and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is on the music faculty at Amherst College. |
Harley Erdman, Librettist
Harley Erdman is a theater writer whose work includes original plays, opera librettos, book & lyrics for musicals, translations, and adaptations. With composer Eric Sawyer, he created the opera The Garden of Martyrs. His screwball comedy Nobody’s Girl was commissioned for the Northampton Academy of Music’s grand reopening in 2014. With composer Aaron Jones and co-writer Gina Kaufmann, he is creating the indie-rock musical Donny Johns, which adapts the Don Juan legend to a contemporary college campus. He wrote the libretto for The Captivation of Eunice Williams, developed with Linda McInerney with music by Paula Kimper. He is the author of five books, including the influential Staging the Jew and an anthology of his translations of plays by 17th-century Spanish women. His commissioned work as a translator of contemporary Latin American theater includes plays by Guillermo Calderón, Concepción León, and Arístides Vargas. He is a winner of the Association for Hispanic Classic Theater’s Translation Prize, the Kahn Prize, and a Fulbright Scholarship. He is Professor of Theater at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. |
Barry Werth, Author of source book
Barry Werth is an award-winning journalist and the acclaimed author of six books. His most recent book is The Antidote, a close-up of the upstart pharmaceutical company Vertex and the ferocious but indispensable world of pharma that it inhabits. His previous book, Banquet at Delmonico’s, was named one of Barnes & Noble’s top ten nonfiction books of 2009 and one of Amazon’s top ten history books of the year. The Scarlet Professor won the Lambda award for biography and the American Library Association’s Randy Shilts prize for nonfiction. It was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award and was named a top ten book of the year by The Washington Post. The Billion Dollar Molecule, his earlier book about Vertex, was named one of Fortune’s 75 “Smartest Books We Know” and a Business Week top ten book of the year. His articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and GQ, among other publications. In addition, he has taught journalism and nonfiction writing at Smith College, Mount Holyoke College, and Boston University. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts. |