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New York City. 20th Century. Poverty. Music. AIDS. Hospitals. Love.

BROKE

Poet Maggie Dubris and Composer Andy Teirstein are creating a new opera, Broke.

In each person’s life, there are decisions that change everything. In 1896, Irish farm-girl Katie Henry got on a ship to America to make a new life. In 1983, Nikki Owen took a job as a paramedic in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen. Katie Henry went on to found St. Clare’s hospital during the depths of the Depression. Nikki Owen worked on the St. Clare’s ambulance for 25 years, through the AIDS crisis, the years of crack and homelessness, and the attack on the World Trade Center. Broke is the story of those women, and the people who made St. Clare’s the eternally strange, always broke, but unfailingly kindhearted hospital that it was. In essence, the piece is a love song to a hospital that attended to the poor when other hospitals would not. We see its rise through the 20th century and its demise into rubble and, finally,  condos, in the 2000s.  Nikki and Katie are two women separated by a hundred years, but joined by their struggle to find their place in a world commandeered by men.  

Lyric Videos and Early Scenes

This is a lyric video for Scene 2 from the opera Broke by Maggie Dubris and Andy Teirstein. IMid-1980s. Paramedics Nikki and Felice (Erin Stewart, Joy Jan Jones) bend the rules to give morphine to a fallen carriage horse in Times Square. Their medical director (David Dewitt) oversees it all.

This is a lyric video for Scene 5 from the opera Broke by Maggie Dubris and Andy Teirstein. 1935, New York City, the docks along the Hudson River. Mother Alice and an accomplice are trying to recruit newly arrived Irish girls to come and work at her new hospital..

This is a lyric video for Scene 7 from the opera Broke by Maggie Dubris and Andy Teirstein. 1939, Hells Kitchen, New York City. Mother Alice, the founder of St. Clare's Hospital, is out in the middle of the night burying statues of St. Clare in nearby vacant lots that she hopes to purchase in her quest to expand the hospital.

This is a lyric video for the second half of Scene 3 from the opera Broke by Maggie Dubris and Andy Teirstein. New York City Hell's Kitchen neighborhood, 1934. An Irish nun, Mother Alice, establishes a new hospital called St. Clare’s, “on a shoestring and a prayer.”.

This is a lyric video for Scene 6 from the opera Broke by Maggie Dubris and Andy Teirstein. New York City, mid-1980s. Two female paramedics from St. Clare's Hospital  ponder the eternal question, “What do women want?” after being relentlessly cat-called on their respective commutes to work.

This is a lyric video for Scene 8 from the opera Broke by Maggie Dubris and Andy Teirstein. It takes place in The Pyramid Club, East Village, New York City. It’s the summer of 1983, and AIDS (then known as GRID), is beginning to kill people in the city.

 

Scenes from an early rehearsal

 

Filmed in the spring of 2021, we documented the process of beginning to rehearse two scenes (without choreography).

Scene 3. part 1

Set in Ireland in 1896, Katie Henry leaves rural Ireland for the US and begins her journey to become Mother Alice, founder of St. Clare’s hospital

Scene 1

Set in New York City in the mid-1980s, paramedic Nikki introduces us to the city from the vantage point of her ambulance.

Two Scenes From A Black-box Video Shoot Summer 2023

Scene 13 (In the Dust Zone) is towards the end of the piece, set in September 2001, at the attack on the World Trade Center. Two paramedics, (Joy Jan Jones and Erin Stewart), respond to the attack, and the next day must go back to work answering 911 calls.

Scene 9 (Innocent Victims) is midway through the piece, set in the 1980s, towards the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. The head of the Emergency Room (David DeWitt) grapples with his position as a gay man in the midst of the stigma and fear. The scene also features Erin Stewart and Joy Jan Jones as two 911 paramedics.