Commissioned by Beth Morrison Projects

Librettist: Stephanie Fleischmann

Dramaturg: Annie Wang

The Silver Cypress imagines a world both dystopian and mythic. Our protagonist is a young woman orphaned by human conflict and raised in a world where water has been depleted and empathy is scarce. Leaving the small industrial village where she was raised, she sets out on a journey across a barren landscape to find her adopted brother, save a sacred tree, and reclaim her people’s cultural memory. The Silver Cypress pulls from Persian mythology, Farsi poetry, and epic literature to weave a new fable for our modern world on the edge of climate catastrophe.

Inspired by a short story written by Anahita Ghazvinizadeh

Threshold of Brightness follows a famous and controversial Iranian poet, Forough Farrokhzad, as she is seriously injured in a car crash and enters a dream-like state where she reckons with the ghosts of her past.