The Last Five Years is a well-known contemporary musical by Jason Robert Brown. In spite of a queer narrative structure, its content is resolutely heterosexual, highlighting the challenges of a five-year marriage in some deeply gendered ways. This project places Cathy and Jaime's marriage shortly after the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court ruling to explore this canonical musical of emotion and ambition through a queer lens.

 

A central conceit of our original workshop production was eschewing the performance convention of having Cathy and Jamie alone onstage throughout and, instead, placing them in context in a world with both other people and each other. (For more information about the production and the questions and concepts guiding it, visit the resources linked on this page!) It is somewhat ironic, then, to adapt our experiment in a time of social distancing.

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Below you will find a partial digital archive of Cathy and Jamie's relationship: video calls, social media posts, and - a holdover from our intended scene shifts in production - voicemails. View and listen in show order or, if you like, chronological. (In that case, each voicemail goes with the song that follows.)