The protagonist is an opera singer of ‘a certain age', Nora Sedler, deported, in the autumn of 1941, to the Litzmannstadt Ghetto, now ?odz in Poland. She arrives on a transportation together with a large group of Jewish artists from Western Europe.
She escapes the Holocaust. At what price?
We find the answer to that question in her reply... "I sing for the Gestapo. It was I, I whom they chose. Time and again, they chose me, again, again and again... And I, Toscanini's darling, I sing the most exquisite of arias... naked on a chair... I was lucky in the ghetto!"
Many years on and she is now a mature woman and one of the world's outstanding singers. In her dressing room at The Met, after a performance, Nora receives a note announcing the presence of a young composer and a devotee of her talent. He has signed the note with the same surname as that borne by the Polish family who saved Nora's baby, born in the ghetto. Nora has never seen her son.
We become witnesses to the experiences that Fate held in store for her...
In the play, the audience encounter Nora Sedler in the mid-1960s, in her dressing room at the Met. Nora has spent many years in New York itself and in the USA. She has made a tremendous career for herself there. She is adored by the Americans, even though she has her own, rather specific, take on them. The story she tells includes a number of things that have befallen her in New York. To a large extent, her tale is a tale of the New York opera scene.
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