Event

A Doll's House: A New Opera

"The door slam heard around the world."

When Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House premiered in 1879, the character of Nora Helmer became a world-wide symbol of female empowerment, and spurred many women to begin finding their voices in a patriarchal world.

Inspired by the continuing relevance of Nora's plight, we are currently developing a 90-minute opera entitled A Doll's House: A New Opera, composed by Grace Oberhofer and directed by Allison Benko.

The piece follows the three-act structure of Henrik Ibsen's original play, using music as Nora's "gilded cage" throughout a story of illegal loans, blackmail, and the unraveling of a domestic life that honors manipulation over authenticity. As Nora reaches the end of a three-day masquerade to hide her past actions from her husband, she is forced to find her own voice--it is then that her musical confines begin to unravel.