The Golden Veil was a musical gothic parlor spectacle that told, in multiple iterations, the familiar tale of a poor shepherdess seduced and abandoned by a would-be inventor. Part pastoral ballet and part backwoods jamboree, part Punch-and-Judy show and part forlorn testimony, part bleak exposé of the lives of the rural poor and part celebration of their lovely handicrafts, The Golden Veil conjured the intimacy of a séance and the abandon of a hootenanny. In the NTUSA’s inimitable style, The Golden Veil explored the ways that we use narrative to render the painful picturesque as it prods at the perverse underbelly of our nostalgia for “simpler times.”