Publisher

Protone

Instrumentation

String Quartet, Piano, Vocal

Video

Youtube

Year of Composition

2016

How Gulliver Returned Home
in a Manner that was Very Not Direct

Victoria Bond, composer;

Stephen Greco, librettist

Doug Fitch, director/scenic and puppet designer and builder

How Gulliver Returned Home in a Manner that was Very Not Direct is a “puppet operetta” based on Jonathan Swift’s famous work of fanciful satire, Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Aimed at family audiences, where everyone can delight in the story’s visual magic and the gentle fun it pokes at British stuffiness, the 70-minute operetta is comprised of four “travelog” acts surrounded by short domestic scenes set in the Gulliver family home in England. The work employs a cast of 11 and chamber ensemble and can be presented [STAGING].
How Gulliver Returned Home… has been in development since 2015 and was commissioned in 2016 and by American Opera Project (AOP). Also in 2016 the work was supported by the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation through Opera America's Commissioning Grants for Female Composers. Public showings of excerpts of the work took place in 2017 (through AOP) and 2019 (through Cutting Edge Concerts). The work had been scheduled for a 2022 premiere by the Salzburg Marionette Theater/Salzburg Mozarteum (where Fitch and Greco had previously created a work), but COVID derailed that plan. Now with a 2022 grant from the Jim Henson Foundation, scenes from the work were performed with puppets by the Mostly Modern Projects on May 13, 2022.
The creators’ vision was of a multi-genre theater work combining Swift’s classic cultural critique with theatrical magic that delivers surprising innovations in puppetry and staging. The presentation was conceived to allow the symphonic ensemble to enrich the audience experience not only by playing the score but by adding engaging foley elements.
Swift’s classic satire-cum-travelogue is particularly timely today in our current society where a considerate curiosity about other people from different cultures, as embodied by Gulliver, is more important than ever. Thus it seemed important to the creators to target this work toward whole families, who might be stimulated to engage in post-performance discussions about difference—different-sized people, different cultures, etc. The puppet-operetta approach to the story asks the performers to play many characters– sometimes multitudes!—and put both their virtuosity and their humanity front-and-center in the spectacle. The work sticks respectfully to Swift’s novel and the enduringly valid cultural critique it embodies. Yet the creators’ envision Gulliver not just as a physical traveler but a conceptual explorer, investigating the idea of rejecting his restrictive home culture and possibly becoming a citizen of the broader world.