During Fellow Travelers, the audience is a bystander into the lives of those living in Washington, D.C. during the lavender scare, and we witness the love story between two men during the witch hunts of the McCarthy era. This opera is one of pain, longing, and questioning. These people live in very oppressive society, they are constantly being watched and never know when they can be themselves. The production design team's goal was to highlight this society and imagine how it affects every aspect of the character's lives. There were a lot of times that we wanted to push the boundary between musical theatre and opera and add more theatricality to the scenes. For sound specifically, we explored a lot of spots for sound effects, and knew early on that we wanted to start the show by having the audience transition into the chaos of Timmy's mind.

I wanted my sound design to reflect that society in the way that it can be “intrusions” on the character’s safety and act as a reminder that they are never truly alone. With the idea of using outside sounds as reminders of society, the challenge was to figure out how to use the sound effects in tandem with the music without conflicting with the space that the music takes up.

For the system, I planned to experiment by using a line array for this production. My initial plan was to place a single six box array in the center to support the few sound effects involved along with any reinforcement the pit will need. I ended up hanging a single five box center array of d&b T10s. I supplemented the array with two fills to provide a coverage to the outskirts of the seating that is being missed by the line array. My goal is for the sound to seem like it is coming from on stage. This is a very intimate and moving story and I want everything to be contained within the world. I used this production as an opportunity to learn and explore both opera and tuning line arrays.

Once we moved into space and started playing with sound, most of the sound effects ended up being cut, and the focus turned towards curating the audience experience as they walked into space. Research went into finding political speeches centered around communism and editing them together to create an uncomfortable effect on the audience as they say and waiting for the show to begin. This opera did not use microphones, but we did fully mic the orchestra in order to provide adequate foldback coverage on stage and on the platform when they are the farthest away from the pit.