Which makes sense. Opera, as the scholar Catherine Clément has written, is built on “the undoing of women.” So “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel about a dystopian but all-too-possible theocracy built on rituals of rape and repression, was always a natural fit with “Lucia” and “La Traviata.”
Composed by Poul Ruders to a faithful, slightly clunky libretto by the actor and writer Paul Bentley, “The Handmaid’s Tale” had its premiere in Copenhagen nearly two decades ago, and its only production in the United States, at the Minnesota Opera, in 2003.
That’s a shame. The Boston Lyric Opera’s staging, which runs through Sunday, reveals it to be a brilliant, brutal opera, one that should be taken up widely. Even if it is, though, I doubt that it will be done as powerfully. This is a triumph for the Boston company.
Why? For one thing, there’s the matter of location. Under the artistic direction of Esther Nelson, the Lyric had made a habit of taking at least one of its four annual productions out of the opera house even before it lost its home, the Shubert Theater, in 2015. Plenty of companies have been doing the same, and like a lot (though not all) of that work, some of the Lyric’s productions have had only the loosest connection between the sites chosen and the operas presented.
Not this time. Atwood’s book is set in the Republic of Gilead — a future version of Massachusetts, evocative for its Puritan roots. It opens in a gymnasium, a basketball court — probably the very one in which the Lyric’s production takes place: the Lavietes Pavilion, just across the Charles River from Harvard Yard. In the opera, like the novel, we see a descent into dictatorship through the memories of a witness, Offred, who tries to challenge her oppression after being captured by the regime and forced into slavery for her fertility. This production tells her story where she lived it.
Although it is challenging to stage an opera in a sports arena, especially one with a large cast and a very large orchestra, the challenges are surmounted by director Anne Bogart, movement director Shura Baryshnikov and designer James Scheutte. The action takes place at center court, surrounded on three sides by seats and bleachers, and on the fourth by the orchestra, piled in where one hoop ought to be. The buzzer is repurposed as if it were a prison bell. The set is bare; the few props are wheeled on and off by Gilead’s riot police. The sound is better than it has any right to be, helped by a hint of amplification and decent balancing by conductor David Angus.
Ruders’ score is oppressive — too much so for comfortable listening, though that’s probably the point. Cut slightly, and wisely, by the composer for this production to focus the story more on its essentials, it lets up barely at all, except for a remarkably tender, second-act duet between Offred and her past self about her love for a daughter lost to the regime.
The score sets a harsh, dissonant, unrelenting portrait of the power and savagery of Gilead against static, quieter sounds for Offred’s interior life, sounds that always feel profoundly menaced and unhappy. The atmosphere is stifling, resonant of Berg but also, with its use of hymns and an organ, of Britten’s “Peter Grimes.” There is no escape, nor is there joy: Witness the cacophonous, Ivesian punishment that “Amazing Grace” is subjected to in counterpoint to a rape sequence.
Find joy, instead, in the towering account of Offred offered here by mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano. Restless, powerful, profound, she is as formidable as this astonishingly demanding role deserves. Caroline Worra sings Aunt Lydia — the enforcer of mores, the assailer of the weak, the collaborator with the patriarchy — with sadistic relish, half venomous, half gleeful. Among her victims are the resistance member Ofglen, given understanding and sense by Michelle Trainor.
They are not alone in their excellence in a 16-person cast, the women of which sing so well that they make anything seem possible. As the scholar and critic Lucy Caplan notes in a smart program essay, we can see the women of opera as undone, after Catherine Clément — or we can find ways to “defy that ‘undoing.’”
We do not quite know what happens to Offred in the end, as she is hauled away by heavies who might be from the regime, or might be from the resistance. Perhaps the answer is up to us.
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‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ runs through Sunday at the Lavietes Pavilion, Boston; blo.org.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.