Jennifer Zetlan Will Sing Ellen West At PROTOTYPE Festival

Soprano Jennifer Zetlan reprises the title role in the New York City premiere of composer Ricky Ian Gordon and Pulitzer Prize winning poet Frank Bidart's Ellen West in Gelsey Kirkland Arts Center at the PROTOTYPE Festival. In the summer of 2019, Zetlan portrayed Ellen in the world premiere of the opera in Saratoga Springs, in a performance hailed by critics as "brilliant," "penetrating" and "a tour de force." The PROTOTYPE production will also star Metropolitan Opera baritone Nathan Gunn. Performances will run from January 14-19, 2020.

This gripping new chamber opera is a Co-commission and co-production by Beth Morrison Projects and Opera Saratoga. The creative team from the critically acclaimed Opera Saratoga production will once again join forces, including stage director Emma Griffin and conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya.

A remarkable operatic poem, Ellen West plunges into the emotional, psychological, and physical challenges of a woman struggling with perceptions of her body, her relationship with food, and the world closing in around her. Inspired by one of the earliest cases of existential analysis, poet Frank Bidart and composer Ricky Ian Gordon examine the lives of psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger and his patient, Ellen West. Bidart's poem, which serves as the opera's libretto, juxtaposes the clinical observations of Binswanger with fictitious entries of Ellen's journals, illuminating a psychological portrait of a woman at war with her body.

Full cast and production information for the PROTOTYPE Festival production of Ellen West are available at http://prototypefestival.org/shows/ellen-west/