What Belongs to You

Garth Greenwell's What Belongs to You "tells the story of a man caught between longing and resentment, unable to separate desire from danger, and faced with the impossibility of understanding those he most longs to know."

This manifests as an obsession with a hustler named Mitko, with whom the unnamed narrator begins a long, unstable, and ultimately destructive affair. The story is specific and personal, but the experience Greenwell describes is universal: the search for self and the desire to belong amidst loneliness and enduring heartbreak.

Greenwell falls into a lineage of queer literature that reaches back through Edmund White and Jean Genet to Arthur Rimbaud. His tale is operatic in emotional scale and his writing is inherently musical, in no small part because Greenwell trained as an opera singer before becoming a writer.

David T. Little's score looks back to look forward, channeling the white heat of Britten's Rimbaud setting, Les Illuminations, the melancholy of Dowland, Monteverdi, Schubert, and vanitas paintings, and the startling color of Gerard Grisey's Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil.

What Belongs to You seeks to capture timeless pain in a new frame, as Greenwell's text is distilled to its poetic core and presented anew as music-theatre.