On a fall day in the 1990s, North Fork-based journalist Steve Wick was shopping at the King Kullen in Cutchogue when he saw a man wearing tattered clothes balance two grocery bags on the handlebars of a bicycle and pedal off.
Pictured Above: Librettist Lee Bynum, Director Tanya Birl-Torres and Composer Natalie Brown are the New York-Based creative team adopting Mr. Wick’s book into an opera.
His curiosity piqued, Mr. Wick later found the man pedaling up Depot Lane, where he crossed the railroad tracks and pedaled down a road behind a barn to a low-slung cement building.
The next day, he knocked on the door of that building and was granted entry by the crew boss of the last farm labor camp on the North Fork, beginning a long journey into the lives of the people who worked and lived there.
Mr. Wick’s reportage over the ensuing years reunited many of the workers — Black, southern-born people who had few ties left to the families they’d left behind — with their families, and also bore witness to lives that were in many ways a modern form of enslavement.
Along with photographer Viorel Florescu, he reported on the lives of the people living in the camp for Newsday, and collected these stories in a 2024 book, “All that Remains,” published by the Cutchogue-New Suffolk Library.
This year, in partnership with the Rites of Spring Music Festival and choreographer and director Tanya Birl-Torres, this story is now being transformed into an opera, one that begins and ends with the spirit of freedom embodied by the turning wheels of a bicycle.
The Rites of Spring Music Festival has just launched a fundraising campaign for the project, hoping to raise $50,000 in tax-deductible donations to develop the work for an in-process performance on July 19 at Sylvester Manor on Shelter Island. Find Out More.
North Fork committee members Mariela Ostroski, Steve Wick, David Warren and Paolo Bartolani, with Newsday photographer Viorel Florescu’s portrait of Cutchogue labor camp crew boss Jimmy Wilson.
A Chance Encounter
Serendipity brought all of these artistic elements together.
In the summer of 2025, Ms. Birl-Torres was performing as part of a Rites of Spring Music Festival concert by the Overlook Quartet at the Landcraft Garden Foundation in Mattituck, when she chanced to meet Mr. Wick, who was there to see the concert. They bonded over their shared love of the work of novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, who had documented the lives of Black laborers, mostly in the southern United States.
Mr. Wick sent Ms. Birl-Torres a copy of the book, and she said she “saw so many parallels to my work, and my passion for stories of the south. I didn’t know anything about the history of migrant farms.”
“I had been wanting to work on an opera, and this story is so devastating that the dramatics of it lent to opera,” she said. “Some content in opera is so difficult that it has to transcend the spoken word.”
Ms. Birl-Torres, who works in New York City, spread word among her network that she was looking for a composer and a librettist to develop Mr. Wick’s work for the stage.
“For this project, I thought the creative team should consist of Black artists,” she said. Once she got to know Lee Bynum, the Executive Director of Maestra Music, which supports female composers, she knew she’d found a librettist who could adopt the story.
“I knew Lee could get into the humanity of the people, to give them their dignity back and give each character a sense of who they are and what they are questioning on their journey,” she said.
Lee Bynum has already produced a three-page treatment for the libretto, filled with rich characters whose lives embody textured pasts, disappointments that had sent them on a path to the camp, and hopes for the future. The opera is centered around a brilliant young woman who repairs machinery, working obsessively on an old bicycle, a metaphor for other broken machines, people and systems that she hopes to repair.
“I love how Lee tied in the bicycle — that’s my favorite part, and it made me want to cry,” said Ms. Birl-Torres, who said that, as a dancer and a choreographer, a bicycle also speaks to the movement that is central to her work. “To me, movement and migration are one and the same. We have the bicycle not only as an artifact, but as a metaphor for escape, for being able to be free.”
Ms. Birl-Torres has now brought Lee Bynum’s treatment to composer Natalie Brown, whose shows include an opera adaptation of “for colored girls” and an original musical, “little white lies,” to weave in the music.
“It’s going to emotionally tell a story about a place,” said Mr. Wick. “Turning a book into an opera is a really different thing — you’re telling a story visually and through song.”
Putting the Pieces Together
It’s not Mr. Wick’s first foray into an adaptation for the stage — Sag Harbor playwright Joseph Pintauro had adapted his second book, “Heaven and Earth: The Last Farmers of the North Fork.”
“There was a point where I thought, man, is he going in a different direction, but he had to tell the story on a stage,” said Mr. Wick. “You can’t go on stage and read someone’s book. You literally have to reimagine a way to tell a story.”
“This seems to me a natural evolution of Rites of Spring,” said Paolo Bartolani, Executive Director of the festival, who for the past ten years has been “presenting arts and music, connecting with the places and history and natural setting.”
Mr. Bartolani said Rites of Spring has raised more than $11,000 to date, part of which is the festival’s contribution of $5,000.
He’s happy that the first local performance of this work will be held at Sylvester Manor on Shelter Island, which was once the largest northern slave plantation in the United States and is now run by a non-profit looking to fully tell its story.
Ms. Birl-Torres says the $50,000 will likely get the project through 2027, “including a week of development residency, and another fleshed out works in progress performance” after Sylvester Manor.
“There are so many unknowns, but the magic number on Broadway is seven years” to develop a project, she said, adding that she is also in the process of seeking grant funding for the opera. “The beauty of what this can be is that, as we’re developing and growing, there will always be entry points for people to engage with this work.”
“Performance Number One is at Sylvester Manor, and I would love to see it at The Met or other major opera houses,” said David Warren, who is on the North Fork committee working with Mr. Bartolani on the project, along with Cutchogue-New Suffolk Library Local History Librarian Mariella Ostroski, Mr. Bartolani, Mr. Wick and representatives from Sylvester Manor.
“It’s kind of miraculous,” said Ms. Ostroski of the partnerships that are being built through this project. “The stars were in alignment. It’s pretty incredible.”
Ms. Ostroski, working with Jan Nicholson of North Fork Side by Side, had shepherded the library’s publication of the book, and the library’s attorney is drafting a letter waiving its rights to compensation from the production of the opera.
Copies of the book are still available at the library, as a thanks for a $150 donation.
“History is a living thing,” said Mr. Wick, who is also working with the North Fork Project to tell the stories of the enslaved people who had lived here. “It needs to evolve and be told in a truthful way. That’s not butting up against the modern day reality. We are telling a unique story that is about here, but has a much wider view as well.” — BHY
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