Luke Hathaway, Feb 24, 2026.
A New York City of the Mind and Heart
Changes in the States have left Eurydice Fragments without a home. What would it be like if that home was everywhere? Eurydice Fragments’ co-creator Luke Hathaway reflects.
I was writing about last week’s news when I was interrupted by this week’s news, – I joked a few days ago that the whole country would love a slow news week, and I sure would. For one thing we could think about where we are and how we got there and what we do next, instead of scrambling to keep up with where we’re going, by which I mean tumbling, falling, being shoved. — Rebecca Solnit, Meditations in an Emergency, 22 June 2025
Last Week’s News
‘I was writing about last week’s news when I was interrupted by this week’s news.’ That’s Rebecca Solnit, writing in the 22 June edition of her newsletter Meditations in an Emergency. Her words made me think about Eurydice Fragments: the re:Naissance Opera project in which I was immersed, when we were all interrupted by this week’s news, and next week’s, and the next week.
Eurydice Fragments premiered at the Signals Studio in Vancouver on 15 November 2024. We were deep in rehearsals when the results of the American election were announced on November 6th. I still remember co-creator Debi Wong, our director, drawing us into a circle on that difficult morning, and trying to give us some kind of permission to feel our feelings. ‘This is a heavy day.’
Eurydice Fragments is the story of ‘O’, a trans person, who quests through time and space for aspects of themself that have been suppressed/repressed/erased.
It is a story of nonbinary identity that goes mythologically deep: what happens when the circumstances of our lives lead us to challenge the binaries that have heretofore defined us — not only male and female, but also hell and heaven, east and west, life and death?
It is a trans story that claims ground not just for the enduring reality of gender-expansive existence but for nuanced conversations taking place within our trans+ and queer communities: conversations not about whether we are, but about how we are.
We brought this story to life with a diverse company of gender expansive creators: all of us were unique in the room, yet — I felt — none of us alone. It was a place of profound allyship across distinctions of identity, within our community/ies and beyond.
We came out of that premiere poised to tour the work to National Sawdust in Brooklyn: a ‘hip, sophisticated’ venue in the queer hub of NYC — that city being second home to Debi.
And then, on Jan. 20, 2025, the new president was inaugurated Stateside, and, within 24 hours, began to issue executive orders which sought to legislate transness out of existence.
Two Kinds of People
There’s two kinds of people in this world —
it’s like the doctors told us: —
man and woman, male and female —
when the bounds become unclear,
I don’t know how to love you guys:
you see that? I’m not queer.
These are the words of Tim, the fear-stricken partner of nonbinary O, at the top of the show. When I wrote them, I thought of them as almost in the realm of caricature: an overdrawn sketch of a transphobic position, which decays even as Tim sets it out — he can’t reconcile his own contradictions, and is left alone. I never thought I would see these words, or words like them, assume legislative effect in one of my countries of origin (I am a dual citizen, U.S./Canadian), in 2025.
Within days, the executive orders were causing havoc in my community/ies: trans histories removed from federal websites, folx misgendered en masse, our passport applications stalled or denied, our access to healthcare threatened or evaporated…. The prospect of a visit to my sister and brother, both resident in the States, began to feel like a bad idea. People I didn’t even know came up to me at events to tell me so. Eventually, my professional organization did, too.
But that’s all last week’s news. Amid the weeks on weeks of concatenating oppressions — folks intimidated, deported, detained, and killed; the continuing (from long before Jan. 21) atrocities of genocide and economic exploitation and environmental degradation and racist violence … — it’s been hard to hold onto that felt sense of devastation, even though it has remained with me, a kind of traumatic residue, as I try to imagine how the heck to be an ally to other communities — and overlapping communities — that are being attacked.
And amid all of that — amid and through all that, though I’m ashamed to admit it, even here — a still small voice in my artist heart, saying, ‘But what about New York?’
But What About New York?
Well, it’s not just New York, you know? It’s ‘New York, New York’, sung by an AFAB teenager wearing tails, at a little town talent show in that that part of Anishinaabe/Haudenosaunee/Neutral territory colonially known as rural southwestern Ontario — where I grew up — the fabulous Margery Schultz, where are you now, my first queer icon. The New York of the mind and heart and spirit: everything that awaited us, on the other side.
The other side of what? Isn’t that just another binary formation? Rural/urban, here and there? Eurydice Fragments begins with a nonbinary person escaping from their life into a place where they can be free — only to end up in dissolving the boundaries between that place and all the other places. Because, as Ani Difranco (my second queer icon?) put it: no one can be free until we’re all on even ground.
It was weeks after the inauguration before I dared to speak aloud to Debi what I’d been feeling: What about New York? Didn’t Brooklyn need us more than ever? And, at the same time, wasn’t it lunacy to try to bring a cast/crew/creative team of trans and gender-nonconforming people across the border into the States, right now?
In the event, Eurydice Fragments at National Sawdust has been postponed. The reasons are as much practical as political — we need more time to prepare, a longer window in the venue than they were able to offer us, & c. & c. These vagabond shoes — I think of the phenomenal platform boots that costume designer Alexa Fraser found for Asitha Tennekoon — yes, friends, these vagabond platform boots are gonna have to put up their longing to stray, and stay put, for the time being.
We look to other venues: in Europe? (Finland? Germany?) Elsewhere in Canada?
And at the same time, as we stay put, I feel how the Styx — our cosmic queer space, that liberatory space that our protagonist, O, discovers — doesn’t want to stay put. It doesn’t stay put. It expands. The Styx morphs, just as it does at the end of our show; it dissolves the boundaries between inside and outside, there and here — between small-town Ontario, where I grew up, and that NYC of the heart or mind or spirit. New York New York, where Margery in their tux was going, and I wanted to go there too.
What was it I was going to? What did I imagine was there?
Well, no more lying, for one thing. And I’m not talking about the kind of lie you tell when you’re afraid to tell the truth; I’m talking about the kind of lie you live when you’re telling the truth, and no one will believe you.
In New York, I imagined, that kind of lie would be burned away: everyone would see the truth that was Margery in their tuxedo. That Margery was Frank Sinatra, that Margery was Liza Minelli, that Margery — was Freddy Mercury singing that iconic song, in Highlanders! Or that I was.
A sense of identity so radical you could wake up one morning and be someone else: which is to say, yourself.
Yourself removed from federal websites, yourself misgendered, your own passport application stalled or denied, your access to healthcare threatened or evaporated…. You, or me, intimidated, deported, detained, killed — we are all, ultimately, each other, and until we realize it, these little town blues are not going to be melting away. Even in New York, New York. ■
Luke Hathaway (he/him) is a co-creator of Eurydice Fragments. He teaches English and Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s University.
My heart is with you! My heart is pounding loudly as I read this.