To create p r i s m, Reid collaborated with playwright Roxie Perkins to generate an original story centered around a mother and daughter. Here we are watching a person recover, react, remember, and survive.” A rendering of the set of p r i s m This story is about how we live our lives after we experience something deeply upsetting. What’s interesting here is that we are exploring a psychological space. “Carmen gets stabbed by a jealous lover and then it’s over. “But so often the assault or the murder of the woman is the pinnacle of the opera,” p r i s m director James Darrah points out. In some ways, this is familiar territory for the medium: sopranos have long been victims of violence on the opera stage. Opera, is an 80-minute experimental fusion of theater and opera that draws on its creators’ lived experiences to explore the aftermath of sexual trauma with care and empathy. The piece, which was commissioned and developed by Beth Morrison Projects and is co-presented by that company and L.A. In p r i s m, a new opera from composer Ellen Reid that receives its world premiere at REDCAT this week, a sexual assault survivor’s complex memories, experiences, and coping mechanisms are explored in intimate aesthetic detail. After a traumatic assault, what does life sound like, feel like, look like? What is the precise timbre and pitch of a repressed memory? And what color does that memory take on as it lurks in the fog of a survivor’s subconscious or unexpectedly surfaces?

La opera prism