this week in opera

CITY LYRIC OPERA: THE GARDEN OF ALICE

Who: City Lyric Opera
What: American premiere of Elizabeth Raum’s The Garden of Alice
Where: Blue Building, 222 East Forty-Sixth St.
When: May 17-21, $35
Why: During the pandemic, City Lyric Opera staged a hybrid, interactive version of The Threepenny Opera that people could watch and participate in from the comfort of their homes. Now CLO returns to in-person events with the US premiere of Canadian composer Elizabeth Raum’s The Garden of Alice, an immersive, interactive, multisensory show that takes Alice, and the audience, down a digital rabbit hole of social media and into a hybrid Wonderland of live performances and kaleidoscopic landscapes. Despite the connection to Lewis Carroll’s beloved tale, this production is not meant for kids. Alice will be played by soprano Laura Soto-Bayomi, with bass-baritone Nate Mattingly as the White Rabbit, mezzo-soprano Kelly Guerra as the Duchess and the Queen, soprano Gileann Tan as the Doormouse, and tenor Ryan Lustgarten, baritone Steve Valenzuela, bass Robert Feng, tenor Ramon Gabriel Tenefrancia, and mezzo-soprano Mary Rice in multiple roles.

“We wanted to pick an opera that is cheerful and colorful yet edgy and thought provoking,” CLO cofounder and executive director Megan Gillis said in a statement. “The Garden of Alice merges both the adult and child worlds in a mesmerizing, strange, and beautiful way. Alice finds herself alone, bored, and afraid — a frightening place we all recently visited collectively.” Raum has rescored the 1983 opera for a small chamber orchestra, featuring piano, violin, cello, clarinet, bassoon, and percussion. The presentation consists of an installation of prerecorded material and projections and the ninety-minute opera. “Similar to Alice, we are all entranced by the illusion of an idyllic place, only to discover it’s all fake and convoluted,” Gillis added. “Like Alice’s rabbit hole, we have all begun the journey into the metaverse with so much of today’s digital interactions.” The opera is directed by Attilio Rigotti, with music direction by Danielle Jagelski, video by Orsolya Szánthó, sets and costumes by Gaya Chatterjee, lighting by Jessica Wall, and sound by Evan Tyor.

HARKNESS MAIN STAGE SERIES: AMOC’S WITH CARE

AMOC’s With Care comes to the 92nd St. Y this week (photo by Natalia Perez)

Who: Bobbi Jene Smith, Or Schraiber, Keir GoGwilt, Miranda Cuckson
What: New York City premiere of work by AMOC (American Modern Opera Company)
Where: Kaufmann Concert Hall, 92nd St. Y Harkness Dance Center, 1395 Lexington Ave. at Ninety-Second St., and online
When: In person Thursday, April 28, $30, 8:00; online April 29, noon, to May 1, midnight, $15
Why: In November 2018, married former Batsheva dancers Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber debuted With Care at ODC Theater in San Francisco, a co-commission with AMOC (American Modern Opera Company). The piece, which explores caregiving, carelessness, and loss — as perceived prior to the pandemic, when those issues took center stage — was created by Smith in collaboration with violinist Keir GoGwilt; the latter performs with violinist Miranda Cuckson as current L.A. Dance Project artists-in-residence Smith and Schraiber, portraying a caregiver and a wounded spirit, move around them.

Directed by Smith and featuring music by AMOC cofounder Matthew Aucoin, the work includes chairs, small wooden slats, and sand with dance, music, and spoken word that should take on new meaning in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis. “The original impetus for With Care came out of the last section of my previous work with Keir, A Study on Effort,” Smith said in a statement. “This piece consists of seven efforts, the last of which is the effort of taking care. We thought to expand this study of emotional and physical labor into a theatrical context, investigating the dynamics of caregiving and taking between four characters. Adding Or and Miranda opened a world in which the dynamics of care spiral from empathy to apathy. The more our characters attempt to break free from this cycle, the more they become lost in the maze of their commitments to each other. Yet ultimately the only solace they find is in each other. Never stop caring.”

With Care will be performed live at the 92nd St. Y’s Kaufmann Concert Hall on April 28 at 8:00; a recording will be available online from April 29 at noon to May 1 at midnight. For more on Smith and Schraiber, check out Boaz Yakin’s 2019 film, Aviva, and Elvira Lind’s 2017 documentary, Bobbi Jene. The Harkness Main Stage Series continues in May with the Future Dance Festival and in June with Jonathan Fredrickson of Tanztheater Wuppertal.

DU YUN’S A COCKROACH’S TARANTELLA and ZOLLE

Who: Du Yun, International Contemporary Ensemble, Satomi Matsuzaki
What: New stagings of Du Yun’s A Cockroach’s Tarantella and Zolle
Where: NYU Skirball, 566 La Guardia Pl.
When: Friday, April 29, and Saturday, April 30, $35, 7:30
Why: Shanghai-born, NYC-based composer, performer, Grammy nominee, Pulitzer Prize winner, Guggenheim fellow, and advocator Du Yun is teaming up with the International Contemporary Ensemble and Deerhoof singer Satomi Matsuzaki, in her operatic debut, for new stagings of two earlier works dealing with issues of home and migration, memory and reality. A founding member of ICE, Du Yun will present 2010’s A Cockroach’s Tarantella and 2005’s Zolle, both reconfigured for NYU Skirball; the former features Matsuzaki and Du Yun, the composer, librettist, and sound designer, as the narrators, with violinists Josh Modney and Pauline Harris, violist Hannah Levinson, and cellist Mariel Roberts, while in the latter Du Yun is the Wander Woman Ghost, Matsuzaki is the Same Wander Woman Ghost, assistant director eddy kwon is the Land-Watcher, and Ziad Nehme is the recorded tenor Land-Watcher, with Alice Teyssier on flute, Ryan Muncy on saxophone, Nathan Davis on percussion, Modney on violin, Levinson on viola, and Roberts on cello. The direction, costumes, and video are by Roscha A. Säidow, with lighting by Nicholas Houfek; Kamna Gupta conducts.

Zolle “was scored for the female voice and a narration — two voices of the same character which both embody who she is,” Du Yun, who was an international student when she wrote the work, said in a statement. “When I’m creating, it feels that the ideas and emotions are very heightened but then the words fail at that total expression. A character that has both narration and singing embodies what I think most immigrants are experiencing — ‘How can you manifest these complex emotional subtleties with both entities, with words and with music?’ . . . This piece is about belonging and also questioning about belonging. That was what propelled me to write this story and it really holds a very dear place in my heart.” Kicking off ICE’s twentieth anniversary season, the shows will lead to “Sound Is an Opening,” a series of community events curated by kwon.

TWI-NY TALK: ERIC EINHORN / ON SITE OPERA: GIANNI SCHICCHI

On Site Opera returns to site-specific productions with Gianni Schicchi at the Prince George Ballroom (photo courtesy On Site Opera)

GIANNI SCHICCHI
The Prince George Ballroom
15 East Twenty-Seventh St. between Fifth & Madison Aves.
April 7-10, $50
osopera.org

Since 2012, On Site Opera has been presenting immersive works in unique locations around New York City, including Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw at Wave Hill, Gian Carlo Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors at the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen, Gregg Kallor’s Sketches from “Frankenstein” in the Green-Wood Cemetery catacombs, and Michi Wiancko and Deborah Brevoort’s Marasaki’s Moon at the Astor Chinese Garden Court at the Met.

But when the coronavirus crisis led to a pandemic lockdown and people quarantining at home, barely venturing outside (or leaving the city entirely), the NYC-based company had to reevaluate its immediate future. Cofounding artistic director Eric Einhorn decided to continue making opera, but instead of fans coming to them, OSO would deliver the works straight to the audience, wherever they were sheltering in place.

The result was a series of innovative productions conveyed live over the phone for one person at a time (To My Distant Love); a mailed diary box featuring music by Dominick Argento, Juliana Hall, and Leoš Janáček and text by Anne Frank, Osef Kalda, and Virginia Woolf (The Beauty That Still Remains); and a live Zoom opera based on Georg Philipp Telemann’s Der Schulmeister (Lesson Plan).

Then, just as the troupe was preparing for its first site-specific indoor work in more than two years, Giacomo Puccini’s 1917–18 Gianni Schicchi at the Prince George Ballroom, Einhorn contracted Covid, forcing him to direct rehearsals over Zoom. The first of Puccini’s Il trittico (“The Triptych”), the fifty-minute comic opera tells the story of a family fighting over a will; the original was set in 1299 Florence, but Einhorn has reimagined it for the Roaring Twenties. OSO plans on staging the next two works, Il tabarro and Suor Angelica, in the coming years.

As opening night approached — Gianni Schicchi runs April 7-10 — Einhorn discussed the past, present, and future of OSO in this new age.

twi-ny: Okay, let’s start with the pandemic. What are the immediate thoughts of the head of a site-specific opera company when a health crisis suddenly shuts down indoor and outdoor venues everywhere and people lock themselves inside?

eric einhorn: I had two immediate thoughts when the pandemic hit: First, what does it now mean to be a company built on the idea of gathering in a specific space? And second, how can we as a company serve our community in these troubling times? The first question led us down a road of fascinating exploration about what constituted a site. The safest choice seemed to be to create projects that allowed each audience member’s own location to serve as the “performance site.” So many arts companies were defaulting to digital media as a way to maintain production, which made a lot of sense for most proscenium-based companies, but it did not for us. Looking at audience sites that did not involve patrons sitting on their computers (a must-have thanks to pretty immediate Zoom and YouTube fatigue) led us to create projects over the phone, through the mail, and via mobile app.

The second question of serving our community was answered through the fantastic collaborative efforts of our staff, board, advisory councils, and past artists. We offered free live watch parties of some previous productions, hosted industry panels, and offered free virtual performance coaching. All of this was rolled out in an effort to help our community remain together and offer experiences that could allow us all to focus on the things that brought us joy in the midst of the terrifying first months of the pandemic.

Eric Einhhorn directs via Zoom for latest OSO site-specific production (photo courtesy On Site Opera)

twi-ny: The phone project was To My Distant Love, a Beethoven song cycle performed for one listener at a time over the phone. How did that come about?

ee: Early in the pandemic, I was sitting in my home office going through my score collection, hoping to find some thread of inspiration in these newly troubling times. I pulled out my copy of Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte, which I had once performed when I was pursuing my vocal performance degree many years ago. I had always loved the song cycle for its compact pathos. Rereading the text in 2020, though, resonated in a totally new way. The poetry was about two lovers at a forced distance and the burning desire to be together again. If I didn’t know it was nineteenth-century poetry, I easily could have thought it was brand new and of the moment. Around the same time, I had been made aware of theater companies that created interactive telephone plays for an audience of one. After experiencing one for myself, I became convinced that opera (or a song cycle) could be delivered the same way. We commissioned playwright Monet Hurst-Mendoza to create an interactive script around the song cycle to allow performer and audience member to connect even more, as well as preshow love letters that elicited some fantastic, in-character replies from audiences.

twi-ny: You continued this idea of delivering the company to the audience instead of the audience coming to OSO with the diary box The Beauty That Still Remains, which was mailed out. How did people respond?

ee: After our “low tech” success with the Beethoven phone project, we continued to explore the various ways that we could connect with audiences that were not truly computer-based. Inspiration for The Beauty That Still Remains came from the phenomenon of subscription boxes that now permeate every market and taste. We didn’t know how audiences would respond to a project that was mailed in installments and featured both a tactile element (the box contents) and a digital one (the prerecorded musical performances). It turns out audiences loved it! As with all of our productions, every experiential element was tied into the story, which made it all that much more immersive. Patrons from all over the world engaged with this project, and it gave us yet another opportunity to explore the boundaries of site-specific performance during a time when gathering at a site was not possible.

twi-ny: Last summer you were finally able to gather at a site with The Perfect Pig and Tapestry of New York, at the Glade at Little Island. What did you think about the performance space and Little Island itself?

ee: Performing on Little Island as part of the NYC FREE festival was an incredibly special opportunity. Little Island is such a special place, and the Glade is a magical corner of the park that is perfect for performing. While we were in rehearsals for a full, outdoor production at the same time, the performances on Little Island were actually our first in-person performances since the pandemic began. It was really quite emotional to bring this particular repertoire to Little Island for our first in-person performances in two years. The Perfect Pig is a lovely short opera for families about the self-acceptance, and Tapestry of New York was a concert of selections highlighting many of the incredible communities that make up our city. Seeing audience members of all ages gather again and to be able to perform opera for them was truly a gift. For as much as audiences needed live music again, performers and creators needed to produce again.

twi-ny: If I’m not mistaken, your first Zoom show was Lesson Plan this past January. Had you previously been using Zoom for rehearsals or other reasons?

ee: Lesson Plan was, indeed, our first Zoom-based production. We had been using Zoom since the start of the pandemic for meetings and some select rehearsals but never for a full production. When most opera companies went fully digital in 2020, we did a significant amount of self-reflection to consider what it meant to be site-specific in these times of forced distance. In exploring the idea of the audience’s own location as the “site,” as you mentioned, we created productions for the phone and through the mail. We also created a self-guided walking tour program [The Road We Came] that explored Black music history in New York City through a mobile app with prerecorded performances. When planning our 2022 season, specifically the January slot, I took the general consensus of the scientific community to heart when they said that there could very well be another Covid surge during the winter of 2021. It seemed prudent to plan another remote project rather than face the possibility of having to cancel an in-person production.

For a while, I had wanted to create something around Telemann’s cantata Der Schulmeister — a charming comedy about a curmudgeonly music teacher attempting to teach children to sing. There were some jokes in the piece with the kids singing out of sync with the music teacher that immediately made me think of Zoom delays. This seemed like the perfect project for Zoom to become the site. We wanted to expand the piece a bit and create an English translation. For that, we commissioned Rachel J. Peters, who created something incredibly special with Lesson Plan. Our cast and team of engineering wizards brought it to life in such an amazing way — and it was fully remote and live over Zoom. This production choice proved prescient, as Omicron was in full force during the production period.

twi-ny: OSO is getting down to the site-specific business again with Gianni Schicchi at the Prince George Ballroom. Why that opera in that space?

ee: The Prince George Ballroom has been on my list of potential production venues for several years, but we couldn’t quite decide on the perfect piece to perform there. In planning the 2022 season, some of our programming goals were to keep our repertoire on the shorter side and skew towards comedy. We wanted to allow our audiences to ease back into the experience of being back “on site” and, given what the last two years have been like, we wanted to make sure laughter played a significant role in that. [OSO music director] Geoff McDonald and I arrived at Gianni Schicchi for several reasons: It’s funny, under an hour, and filled with some of the best music in opera. In matching the piece to a space, the Prince George Ballroom immediately came to mind as an opulent room perfect to serve as the home of Buoso Donati, the wealthy patriarch of the opera. The large ballroom also accommodates the audience, orchestra, and performers with plenty of room to spare, making sure that no one feels cramped — another important consideration given Covid.

twi-ny: What were the rehearsals like?

ee: Rehearsals were fantastic! To be in a rehearsal studio with so many wonderful artists working on such a masterpiece was really a joy that almost made one forget about the pandemic. That said, we adhered to strict health and safety protocols that included multiple tests every week for everyone involved in the production and fully masked rehearsals — all under the supervision of a Covid compliance manager hired specifically for the production.

https://twitter.com/onsiteopera/status/1511007803728670721?s=20&t=ZEmqgRQZrNceRe4-s1fNXQ

twi-ny: The company is currently celebrating its tenth anniversary. What were your expectations when the company started in 2012? What are your plans for the next ten years?

ee: Back in 2012, On Site Opera was a side project for me. It was an experiment in producing and directing in the crazy format of site-specific production. I never could have imagined it would turn into my full-time job, nor be able to grow to support a staff and as many productions as we now do. There are still moments when I have to pinch myself. The next few years will bring several new commissions, the completion of the Puccini Trittico cycle, and further exploration of the most exciting sites in NYC and beyond. One of the great aspects of the company is its nimbleness. This allows us to remain incredibly flexible in our programming and create productions and initiatives that can serve our community most immediately. In our second decade we will remain committed to our values of equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility as well as rich collaborations with our community of patrons, volunteers, artists, and audiences.

twi-ny: You’ve been a leader in the digital opera movement, incorporating apps, Google Glass, and other cutting-edge technology. How is this impacting your audiences?

ee: Adoption of our various technological initiatives has been quite high across all demographics. I think that it is, in part, due to the way our tech is always integrated into our productions. Whenever we decide to include new technology, we evaluate how the tech will interact with the show, what the adoption process might be, and if it could potentially be distracting. We also are mindful that it does not create a barrier for entry for any audience members. By approaching technology from this people-first angle, our initiatives have been quite successful.

Google Glass was an incredibly exciting experiment that brought together the tech and opera communities. I was disappointed when Google changed Glass’s focus to enterprise versus retail, as it essentially closed the door to further operatic applications. Our mobile app, though, and specifically the supertitle translation module, has had an extremely positive impact on our audiences. Before the app, many of our productions did not feature projected English translations (an industry staple these days) due to our immersive seating arrangements or simply a lack of surfaces onto which we could project in our various venues. The app now allows us to always offer English translations for patrons, as well as other languages — we are now consistently offering Spanish translations and have offered Japanese on a previous show. Plans are in the works for multiple language offerings for all of our productions. Since the app is very intuitive and smartphone-based, most audiences find the use of it in performances quite easy and fun.

twi-ny: When you have time to go out, are you seeing opera, or do you have other guilty pleasures?

ee: The pandemic has made me even more of homebody than I was before. However, when I do go out, it is typically to go on some crazy adventure with my kids or see a musical with my partner.

UPLOAD

Soprano Julia Bullock and baritone Roderick Williams portray a daughter and father dealing with a digital afterlife in Upload (photo by Stephanie Berger)

UPLOAD
Park Ave. Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at Sixty-Seventh St.
March 22-30, $45-$150, 7:30 / 8:00
www.armoryonpark.org
www.vanderaa.net

Created specifically for Park Ave. Armory’s massive Wade Thompson Drill Hall, Dutch composer Michel van der Aa’s multimedia opera Upload is a haunting adventure into a near-future where people can choose to surrender their corporeal bodies and exist for eternity as digital beings. The process involves scanning the brain to make a map of the mind, implanting in the upload their family, social, and personal identities, pushing pain and trauma into the background.

The ninety-minute production begins in total darkness as a father (baritone Roderick Williams) and his daughter (soprano Julia Bullock) share many of the elements that make life unique; phrases such as “light – smile,” “struggle – grip,” “tingle – cheek,” “seek – calm,” and “carry – loss” emerge from speakers placed all around the drill hall. The darkness lifts to reveal lighting and set designer Theun Mosk’s stunning stage, which features three movable, translucent triptych screens in front of a larger movie screen. In the far right corner sits Ensemble Musikfabrik, an eleven-piece orchestra conducted by Otto Tausk; the powerful, immersive sound design, by Tom Gelissen and Paul Jeukendrup, lets van der Aa’s wonderful score, which often turns into scratchy electronic noise, echo gloriously in the cavernous space.

The daughter, in a red jumpsuit, converses with her father, who appears on the movable screens, wearing jeans and an unbuttoned shirt; his image is often blurry or pixelated, indicating the transmission is murky. Williams is actually performing from stage right, a camera projecting him onto the screens. The effective motion capture and graphics are by Darien Brito, with special effects by Julius Horsthuis.

A man is getting scanned to become a digital upload in Michel van der Aa’s multimedia opera at Park Ave. Armory (photo by Stephanie Berger)

The daughter is furious that her father has chosen to become an upload without consulting her; he assures her that he hasn’t left her. “Sweet smile of my child, / I still hear, / I see without knowing that I see. / It’s easier to feel than to explain. / My sense of touch is gone, / but no matter. / I can still think my own thoughts. I went on a journey to be what I must be. / I made this decision for us; / you can no longer lose me. . . . If you can’t live the way you want, there’s no point in living.” She angrily asserts, “Why didn’t you ask how I would feel about all this?”

The moments between father and daughter, which include footage of their home and garden projected onto the back screen, alternate with prerecorded scenes from the clinic that invented the procedure, from a sterile waiting room and laboratory to a fantastical Lego-like structure in shocking blue. The dialogue at the clinic is spoken, not sung. A psychiatrist (Katja Herbers) explains, “I think that what we do here can be regarded as a form of rebirth, analogous to the afterlife. I mean, haven’t we always tried to cheat death?” The smarmy CEO (Ashley Zuckerman) posits, “In the past, when a generation died, we would lose their collective wisdom. And that’s a great loss. . . . By digitizing the mind, removing it from the body, we’re removing it from these risks. Take one last trip in your biological body, and then you’ll live forever. . . . You just have to die first.”

The key to the transfer is a “memory anchor,” something the person being uploaded can think about to make the procedure go smoothly. The CEO notes that “memories are faulty,” but he believes that, technologically, the anchor “will always be reliable.” But as the daughter later tells her father, “No world they created for you can compete with the real one.”

Previously presented at the Dutch National Opera and the Bregenz Festival in Austria, Upload is like a live production of the popular anthology series Black Mirror directed by Ivo van Hove, along with a dash of the Amazon Prime show similarly titled Upload, which also involves a digital afterlife. Van der Aa previously explored what happens following death in his 2006 piece After Life, adapted from the film of the same name by Hirokazu Kore-eda; the opera featured Williams in a way station between heaven and hell.

Upload features dramatic staging at the armory (photo by Stephanie Berger)

The interplay between the live and prerecorded flashbacks, shot by cinematographer Joost Rietdijk, builds off the tension being experienced by father and daughter onstage; as the characters, sometimes assisted by others, push the vertical triptychs back and forth, the films depict nonstatic scenes outdoor, indoors, and underwater, the movement in multiple directions resulting in an uneasy 3D-like effect that matches the emotional mood of the narrative.

Bullock (Girls of the Golden West, Doctor Atomic, Zauberland) and Williams (Eugene Onegin, Billy Budd, Madam Butterfly) sound glorious together; I would have loved to have heard more from them. While there are English subtitles, you won’t need them for his vocals, which are sharp and pristine.

Written, composed, and directed by van der Aa — who was last at the armory with 2017’s Blank Out, in which Williams appeared onscreen in a story loosely based on the life and career of bilingual South African poet Ingrid Jonker — Upload can be confusing at times, but the overall production, complete with a breathtaking surprise near the end, is a genuine treat, a thrilling peek at the potential future of humanity while testing the boundaries of what opera can be.

UPLOAD

UPLOAD
Park Ave. Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at Sixty-Seventh St.
March 22-30, $45-$150, 7:30 / 8:00
www.armoryonpark.org
www.vanderaa.net

Dutch composer Michel van der Aa returns to Park Ave. Armory this month with the North American premiere of Upload, a multimedia opera running March 22-30 in the Wade Thompson Drill Hall. The hybrid work uses film and motion capture technology to tell the story of a father and daughter seeking digital consciousness, an exciting follow-up to Rashaad Newsome’s recently concluded Assembly installation at the armory, which was hosted by the AI known as Being the Digital Griot.

Previously presented at the Dutch National Opera and the Bregenz Festival in Austria, the eighty-five-minute Upload features soprano Julia Bullock as the daughter and baritone Roderick Williams as the father in person, with Katja Herbers as a psychiatrist and Ashley Zukerman as a CEO in prerecorded flashbacks shot by cinematographer Joost Rietdijk. The score is performed by the Cologne-based Ensemble Musikfabrik under the direction of Otto Tausk; the set and lighting are by Theun Mosk, with motion capture and graphics by Darien Brito and special effects by Julius Horsthuis.

Composer, director, and librettist van der Aa was last at the armory with 2017’s Blank Out, in which Williams appeared onscreen in a story loosely based on the life and career of bilingual South African poet Ingrid Jonker. “Park Ave. Armory is one of my favorite performance spaces in the world,” van der Aa said in a statement. “When it presented Blank Out, I was inspired by the response from the armory’s open-minded and diverse audiences. Upload was developed with the Armory in mind.” There will be an artist talk with van der Aa, moderated by performance artist Marina Abramović, on March 22 at 6:00 ($15).

INTIMATE APPAREL

Esther Mills (Kearstin Piper Brown) checks out special fabric saved for her by Mr. Marks (Arnold Livingston Geis) in Intimate Apparel (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

INTIMATE APPAREL
Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 6, $92
212-362-7600
www.lct.org/shows

It takes a special kind of play to become a special kind of opera, but that is just what has happened with two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel, continuing at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse through March 6. The original play debuted at Baltimore’s Center Stage in 2003 and moved the next year to the Roundabout, winning numerous Drama Desk, Obie, Outer Critics Circle, and Lucille Lortel awards.

The new show is a profound transformation, part of the Met/LCT Opera/Musical Theater Commissioning project, the first-ever collaboration between the Metropolitan Opera and Lincoln Center Theater. It began at the Met in 2014 with Nico Muhly and Craig Lucas’s Two Boys and was followed last year by Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice. Intimate Apparel features a lovely score by Ricky Ian Gordon and a superb libretto by Nottage that deals with race, class, misogyny, and poverty.

The poignant drama takes place in Lower Manhattan in 1905, where Esther Mills (Kearstin Piper Brown), the daughter of slaves, toils as a seamstress, saving up to someday open her own salon; she has amassed a small fortune, $1700, over seventeen years. At thirty-five, she worries that she is a spinster who will never find true love. She makes clothes for a wealthy white woman, Mrs. Van Buren (Naomi Louisa O’Connell), and lives in a boardinghouse run by Mrs. Dickson (Adrienne Danrich), an older Black widow who feels successful whenever one of her residents leaves to get married.

She asks, “How many girls have left here? / I can’t count them anymore. / They come as mere babies, / And I teach ’em all I know, / So when they leave, / And leave they must, / They leave here as refined ladies.” At the wedding of one of her residents, Corinna Mae (Jasmine Muhammad), Mrs. Dickson encourages Esther to consider Mr. Charles (Errin Duane Brooks) as a potential match, but she’s having none of it. “He been comin’ to these parties for two years, / And if he ain’t met a woman, / It ain’t a woman he after, I fears,” Esther answers. “Pride’ll leave you lonely,” Mrs. Dickson reasons. But Esther doesn’t believe in romance. “Love!? / I hate that word! / Love doesn’t come to no featherless bird. / Love is a music that I never heard,” she opines.

Esther is shocked to learn that George Armstrong (Justin Austin), a Barbadian working on the Panama Canal, has heard about her from the deacon’s son at her church and wants to correspond with her. Esther can’t read or write, but she begins an epistolary relationship with George with the help of Mrs. Van Buren.

Esther occasionally goes to the fabric seller, Mr. Marks (Arnold Livingston Geis), an Orthodox Jew who saves special bolts of cloth for her. There is obvious electricity between them, but when Esther puts her hand on him affectionately, he pulls away. “The color won’t rub off on you!” she declares angrily. Mr. Marks explains that his religion forbids him from touching any woman who isn’t his wife.

When George finally arrives in New York, he and Esther wed, but married life is not a bed of roses for her, as George seems to prefer hanging out with Mayme (Krysty Swann) in a saloon and not working. He wants to buy a dozen draft horses from a guy in the bar, but he needs Esther’s cash to make the purchase. Mayme, who gets her sexy outfits from Esther, dreams of being a pianist performing at Carnegie Hall. “We all wishing on something,” she says. “I smash all social rules. / ’Cause no one does it for us.” It’s not long before Esther, who has never been one to smash social rules, finds herself reevaluating what, and who, she wants in life.

Beautifully directed by Tony winner Bartlett Sher (My Fair Lady, South Pacific), Intimate Apparel is an intimate sung-through chamber opera that feels right at home at the Newhouse. The music is performed by two pianists, associate conductor Nathaniel LaNasa and Brent Funderburk, facing each other on high platforms, with the words projected onto the walls (along with archival footage and photographs from the early 1900s). Gordon, whose previous opera adaptations include The Grapes of Wrath, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and the just-concluded Yiddish version of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, has created a moving score that floats through the theater.

Things get intimate at opera adaptation of Lynn Nottage play (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Michael Yeargan’s spare set is centered by a circular wooden floor that rotates, with standing doors, a sewing machine, beds, and other pieces of furniture whisked on and off between scenes, blending in with Dianne McIntyre’s choreography. Catherine Zuber’s period costumes range from ravishing to appropriately dour; Esther sews daring outfits for others but allows herself only boring frocks.

The narrative was inspired by Nottage’s great-grandmother, who was a seamstress, and was written shortly after the death of Nottage’s mother; several characters feel imbued with a haunting loneliness. It also is a sharp representation of the immigrant experience, as men and women with roots from Eastern Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa try to make lives of their own in difficult times, lacking the opportunities available to wealthier white families.

Piper Brown, who has appeared is such operas as Aida, La Traviata, and Carmen and such musicals as Ragtime and Caroline, or Change, has the acting chops to match her wonderful voice. Her expressive eyes and movement display how tired and beat down Esther is, wanting desperately to believe in herself without having to rely on anyone else, especially a man. (Chabrelle Williams performs the role at Wednesday and Saturday matinees.) The rest of the cast, which also includes Tesia Kwarteng, Anna Laurenzo, Barrington Lee, Indra Thomas, and Jorell Williams, is exemplary.

With this new version of Intimate Apparel, Nottage again proves that she is one of America’s most talented and important writers. She has explored the human condition, often through the lens of race, class, and socioeconomic injustice, in such stalwart works as Sweat, Ruined, Mlima’s Tale, and By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, compiling a kind of American quilt of powerful stories that has reached yet another level.