Air Force Academy to host opera ‘Glory Denied’

Col. Jim Thompson is America’s longest-held prisoner of war.

Nine years after being held prisoner during the Vietnam War, he’s released and returns to America. But his homecoming is not what one might expect.

That’s the premise of “Glory Denied”, which will be hosted by the Air Force Academy on Sunday. The opera is co-produced by the Chamber Orchestra of the Springs, Opera Theatre of the Rockies and Art Song Colorado.

The opera tells the true story of Thompson, who returned after being held captive in southeast Asia to find his wife, Alice, had begun a relationship with another man and told their children that their father was dead.

“What makes this performance interesting is that it tells the story of them through their own words,” said Eapen Leubner, founder of Art Song Colorado.

“This is based on his book ‘Glory Denied,’ and it’s the real words of these people, both their reminiscences about it as they looked back on the time, but also looking at the letters that they wrote to each other when they were young, before he was captured.”

The story goes back and forth between before the war and after, highlighting the challenges for Thompson and his wife. The opera features four singers between the two characters, a young and idealized Jim and Alice, and their present counterparts.

“This sort of nonlinear storytelling of the show that is the idealized version in their heads of maybe what they could have been or should have been, and then there are the two as they actually were after the entire ordeal, and I think that it’s a very, very interesting story mechanism,” said Jacob Pope, executive director of the Chamber Orchestra.

One of the most integral parts of producing this piece was collaboration, Leubner and Pope said.

“The entire community has come together to tell this story,” Pope said. “It really feels like just this gigantic collaborative effort to get this show off the ground, and to be able to present it for free, which is something that we’re really proud of being able to do because it’s a story that’s really relevant and important to our community.”

The organizers both hope that audience members walk away from the opera with answers — and questions.

“We’re hoping that there are a lot of answers that people maybe are able to unearth in themselves or just in this experience. We also hope that people walk away with a lot of questions about it. This is a complicated story. This is a story where nobody’s really the good guy or bad guy,” Pope said.