After all, the dystopian story abounds with references to Boston and neighboring Cambridge, and suggests a Harvard University — Lavietes, its basketball arena, included — repurposed for the militaristic theocracy of Gilead.
Boston Lyric Opera is running with that possibility. For its new production of the Danish composer Poul Ruders’ unsettling and complex 2000 adaptation of the novel, the company opted for something site-specific. The gym was available, and for the first time the opera will be staged in the city where it takes place.
This is a happy coincidence for Boston Lyric Opera, which has been nomadic while it searches for a permanent home. (The company ended its relationship with its longtime space, the Citi Performing Arts Center Shubert Theater, in 2015.) But that doesn’t mean staging an opera in a basketball arena is without its challenges.
The acoustics, to start, can be a nightmare. And converting the basketball court involves effectively building a theater from the ground up. Then there’s the Ruders opera itself: a dense and difficult score with one of the most taxing mezzo-soprano roles in the repertory. (She spends nearly all of the work’s 2 1/2-hour running time onstage.)
“There’s no comparison,” Jennifer Johnson Cano, the mezzo singing the title role of Offred, said after a recent rehearsal. “This is more challenging than Verdi and Wagner. I’ve done Elvira and Carmen. This beats all of them.”
But despite the opera’s demands — in addition to its leading role’s endurance test, the work also calls for a large orchestra and cast — it is having a resurgence, thanks in large part to the popularity of Hulu’s television adaptation of the novel, the #MeToo movement and the ever more urgent conversation around climate change.
“Any producer wants to have a thermometer on the zeitgeist,” said Esther Nelson, Boston Lyric Opera’s artistic director, who, as it happens, made a small appearance in the 1990 film adaptation. “This is the time to do ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’”
Nelson and the company are ahead of the curve but will soon be joined by others. Ruders — whose new opera, “The Thirteenth Child,” will be given its premiere at Santa Fe (New Mexico) Opera this summer — said that productions were in development in Copenhagen and San Francisco.
“This is certainly a happy thing for a composer,” he added, acknowledging that “The Handmaid’s Tale” has received an unusual number of productions for a contemporary opera, including an acclaimed American premiere in Minneapolis 15 years ago.
He began work on it in the mid-1990s with the blessing of Atwood, who, he recalled, agreed to the adaptation as long as she didn’t have to be involved with it. (She will be in Boston on Saturday to talk about the opera with Ruders at WBUR CitySpace.) His librettist was the British actor and writer Paul Bentley, later known for playing the High Septon on “Game of Thrones;” they collaborated by phone and fax.
The opera, miraculously, loses little of the novel’s plot and themes. The book moves fluidly among three time periods: before Gilead; Offred’s training as a handmaid; and her present. So does the opera, with the casual abandon of a film script — rare for an art form typically limited to a handful of set changes, not more than three dozen.
And while the libretto’s language can be frenetic and wordy, its structure is calculated in symmetries between the two acts. The music of the past is carefree and bright; “Amazing Grace” becomes a motif of irony and hypocrisy; the vocal range of Offred, pointedly a mezzo-soprano and not a soprano to emphasize that she is a slave and not a heroine, is narrow and introverted, allowed to soar only in her most private moments.
Working with David Angus, Boston Lyric Opera’s music director and the conductor of this “Handmaid’s Tale,” Ruders has created a new edition of the score that slightly reduces the orchestration and makes it more manageable for smaller companies.
The libretto, however, remains as difficult to stage as ever. Veteran director Anne Bogart, who casually dropped references to filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder and writer Italo Calvino while explaining her approach to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” is treating the opera as something like a memory play.
She said she envisioned her staging as the experience of wearing virtual reality goggles: The set changes depending on Offred’s perspective, which is, as Johnson Cano said, “a continuous stream.” Anything not currently on Offred’s mind or in her line of sight simply disappears. That means a lot of set pieces are on wheels, coming and going from a backstage that essentially doesn’t exist.
But a large staff has worked to make the arena as much like a theater as possible. Some things are surprisingly easy: The locker rooms don’t require much to become dressing rooms. And, as every team has a coach in need of an office, so, too, does an orchestra have a maestro.
Carl Rosenberg, an acoustician, has been working on the space, aiming to strike a balance between reflective and absorptive surfaces. But everything he does is ultimately speculative: The results won’t be known until the room has an audience.
What he most wants to avoid, he said, is a dead sound for the voices. If no one can hear Offred, there’s no opera. As Bogart said, “The Handmaid’s Tale” occupies a big world, but it’s really the journey of just one person.
“It’s the human heartbeat at the center of this,” she said, “that makes you care.”
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‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ runs Sunday through May 12 at the Lavietes Pavilion, Boston; blo.org.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.