Lyric Opera of Kansas City Announces Explorations Series Production PENELOPE

General Director and CEO Deborah Sandler today announced the final production of Lyric Opera of Kansas City's 2018-19 Explorations Series, Penelope, a groundbreaking song cycle based on The Odyssey, as told from Penelope's point of view. Composed by Sarah Kirkland Snider, Penelope was named one of the five best genre-defying works in 2010 by National Public Radio. The performance, featuring conducted by Carolyn Watson and directed by Alison Moritz, will be held March 30 at 7:30 p.m. at Lyric Opera's Michael and Ginger Frost Production Arts Building. High res photos can be found here.

Penelope originated as a music-theatre piece, co-written by playwright Ellen McLaughlin and Sarah Kirkland Snider in 2007-2008 and commissioned by the J. Paul Getty Center. Lyric Opera will debut a new edition of the work, for voice, string quintet, percussion, and electronica, and which will be produced with a great deal of local and regional talent, including KU conductor Carolyn Watson, and members of the string quintet, all based in the region.

In Penelope, a woman's husband appears at her door after an absence of twenty years, suffering from brain damage. A veteran of an unnamed war, he doesn't know who he is, and she doesn't know who he's become. While they wait together for his return to himself, she reads to him from The Odyssey, and in the journey of that book, she finds a way into her former husband's memory, and the terror and trauma of war.

General Director and CEO Deborah Sandler stated, Our Explorations Series is designed to bring new and important works to our audiences, particularly those which benefit from an intimate space, and those who ask 'what if ?'. In Penelope, we feature the work of Sarah Kirkland Snider, in a new version composed for Lyric Opera, and which takes another look at the return of Odysseus; as a result, the story is told from a fresh and unexpected point of view. Please join us in our new black box theater at the Opera Center, as we once again take you on an unforgettable journey.

Penelope

Sat., March 30, 7:30 p.m.

Lyric Opera's Michael and Ginger Frost Production Arts Building

712 E. 18th Street, Kansas City, MO, 64108 (East Crossroads)

What happens when a soldier finally comes home but remembers nothing? This groundbreaking song cycle, based on The Odyssey but told from Penelope's point of view, is a meditation on the trauma of war, memory, and home. Penelope is sure to be touching, intimate, and dramatic.

PENELOPE paints the landscape of this tale of homecoming, epic and unheroic at once. Like the play where the modern experience of war is mediated through its ancient literary incarnation, her music embraces the expressive range of instruments from the violin family to the electric guitar and the laptop. Eloquently indifferent to the boundaries of style and genre, the music juxtaposes collective experiences crystallized in the vocabularies of romanticism, modernism, minimalism, folk and rock, as if to set in motion a diorama of the Civil War, WWI, WWII, Vietnam and beyond.

Murat Eyuboglu, filmmaker and photographer, about Sarah Kirkland Snider's Penelope

The Kansas City Lyric Opera Guild will provide a reception immediately following the performance; additionally, there will be a talkback after the performance including composer Sarah Kirkland Snider, director Alison Moritz, and Annie Rosen, who portrays Penelope.

Tickets to Penelope are $30. To purchase tickets, call Ticketing & Patron Services at (816) 471-7344. Patrons can purchase and print their tickets at home by visiting www.kcopera.org. Limited student rush tickets are available for $15, starting 90 minutes before the performance, with a valid student ID. Capacity is limited.

The Explorations Series is sponsored by Spencer Fane, LLP, Virginia & Charles Clark, and the William Randolph Hearst Endowed Fund at Lyric Opera of Kansas City.

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