A photo essay on Griffin's opera Cold Spring
Produced at EMPAC in 2010, Cold Spring is an intermedia opera whose central characters, Betty and Barney Hill, were an interracial couple living in a small New Hampshire town when a road trip they took in 1961 went terribly wrong. In 1965, under guided hypnosis, they became famous for the first detailed account of alien abduction and subjection to eugenics-style medical examinations. In Cold Spring, Betty and Barney never encounter aliens, but relive unresolved, ambient cultural trauma embedded in the sanctimony of mid-twentieth century Cold War America.