Three Way and The LGBTQ Community

As artists, we want our work to speak deeply to everyone. We want Three Way to make you feel all kinds of emotions: joy, sadness, even fear—sometimes at the same time. Its three one-act operas—The Companion, Safe Word, and Masquerade—are about sex, identity, and social power. Every audience member is bound to make personal associations with its characters and situations, regardless of that audience member’s specific gender identity or sexuality.

Likewise, all creators have the right to imagine stories, characters, and worlds, regardless of how they personally identify. No single person or group of people owns a subject, a concept or a plot line. If artists only created based on what they have personally experienced, we would live in a very boring world, with a stagnant culture. Who’s to say we haven’t experienced some of what we wrote about? But our job isn’t to document or even discuss our personal lives, but to create art that is true, whatever our personal experiences.

Three Way is a sex-positive comic opera that uses the conventions of sci-fi, rom-com, thriller, erotic fiction, and comedy of manners to convey a message of inclusiveness and hope about the present and future of gender and sexuality. We couldn’t possibly portray all varieties of sexual experience—and never wanted to. The opera is neither a heterosexual opera nor an LGBTQ opera. By design, none of the characters reveals much back story; the emphasis is on action, comedy and behavior, not sociological realism or deep psychology. We believe sexuality is a fluid and mysterious energy central to everyone’s identity. Our characters search for greater authenticity, intensity and communion 

There are no real villains in Three Way, and no one dies. In opera, that sets up a challenge for the creators! No one in the opera is exactly how they appear, which is important to know when thinking about the characters. We didn’t write the opera with any agenda besides making it entertaining, suspenseful, and lightly satirical.

In the first act, The Companion, Joe resembles a cisgender male, but he’s an android. His consent or non-consent with his owner Maya is moot, and meant to reflect her own fears and ambivalence about flesh-and-blood relationships. Those familiar with object sexuality might resonate with that particular opera.

The Client in the second act, Safe Word, dresses up as a young girl because that is his kink. It also contrasts with his initial, stereotypically cis-male behavior. We are working with traditional notions of masculine and feminine not to reinforce them, but to subvert them. The sexual violence in Safe Word is not played for laughs; it’s treated with appropriate tension and seriousness. We were interested in issues of power and inequality between the Domme and the Client, and how dressing up as a girl carries undertones of passive-aggressive misogyny directed at the Domme. Some may find the Client-as-Polly funny or scary or sexy. Or all of the above. It depends on the viewer.

The characters of Kyle and Tyler in the third act, Masquerade, do not self-identify as transgender: they’re a genderqueer couple. We created characters who were gender nonconforming (“postgender”) and pansexual because we wanted to reflect the world we live in. The satire in Masquerade touches all eight characters; no one is villain or victim, and no one is the special object of mockery.

Any tension Kyle and Tyler experience with other characters in Masquerade is there for dramatic and comic effect. At the same time, they are not meant to represent the breadth of gender fluidity, any more than Jessie and Marcus represent the breadth of thirtyish married heterosexuality. If Larry is insensitive about gender fluidity, that’s because it fits his blustery, conservative character and creates an interesting journey for him, which ends in a sexual encounter with Kyle.

If there are moments in Three Way that depict sexual aggression or intolerance, or sexual coercion of one character by another, again, it’s there for effect, not because the creators of the opera endorse sexual aggression or non-consensual sex. We mix comedy and drama throughout because we’re not telling the audience what the “correct” sexual behavior or identity should be. Being human is messy.

In Masquerade, all the characters want different things, but they all definitely want to transform, as they sing together. If operagoers are amused, scared and exhilarated—preferably all three—then the piece is working.

In future productions, other directors and design teams will come up with different approaches to Three Way: less broad comedy and slapstick, more realism, minimalism, or abstraction. All those choices will have different effects on the interpretation. Regardless, the vast majority of audiences have welcomed the work’s humanity and sweetness. We hope more companies will go on the journey with open hearts and minds.

—David Cote & Robert Paterson
June, 2020