Before Night Falls - Opera Southwest

 

                           "Under a dictatorship beauty is always a dissident force because a dictatorship is itself unaesthetic, grotesque."

                                                                                                         -- Reinaldo Arenas

Last February I photographed a dress rehearsal of Opera Southwest's production of Before Night Falls, an opera by composer Jorge Martin and co-librettist Dolores Koch.  The opera is based on the life of Reinaldo Arenas (1943-1990), a gay Cuban poet, novelist, and vocal critic of the Castro regime who came of age during the Cuban Revolution in which homosexuality was a serious crime.

The opera chronicles the arc of Rey's life from the time of his awareness of his own sexuality and introduction to the forbidden gay community in Cuba . . .

to his traumatic experience at age 14 with Fidel Castro's guerilla revolutionaries . . .

to his early work as a writer, when his novels smuggled out of Cuba earned him international accolades.

In 1974 Rey was arrested for "ideological deviation," imprisoned,

 and tortured . . .

until, debilitated, he was forced to renounce his work . . .

. . . and was released in 1976.

He fled to the United States in 1980 as part of the Mariel boatlift (about which, more here).  

Disillusioned with the Cuban immigrant community in Miami, Rey moved to New York City.

In 1987 he was diagnosed with AIDS.  He was able to complete his autobiography, Before Night Falls, before committing suicide in December, 1990.  

His book and the opera explore the universal themes Arenas affirmed as "freedom, memory, imagination, beauty, the questing human spirit, and our individual and collective family."

If you would like to see more images from the dress rehearsal, please visit my website, Todos Juntos Photography, by clicking here.