A work-in-progress performance of award-winning Irish composer Emma O’Halloran and librettist Naomi Louisa O’Connell’s A Mass for Women in Bathrooms. This performance invites audiences to experience how an opera is built during the early stages of music development.

The Catholic Mass is a ritual celebration of sacred body and blood, an act of remembrance, of worship. This opera reframes the Mass through the lens of a family of four Irish women and explores the question: what rituals do we now hold sacred?

Here is a mother, unnamed, referred to throughout only as Mam, who leads us through the Mass, and her three daughters, summoned, as an act of remembrance begins. The three sisters—a teenage holy trinity—are girls who bleed, girls who support each other, girls growing up in a regular household in rural Ireland. It is both a coming-of-age story for them, and a tale of disconnect from Mam—their struggling relationship a metaphor for the crumbling institutional power of the church in contemporary Ireland. Themes of reproductive rights, fertility, and aging are explored in stories borne out of the personal experience of the creative team.

Commissioned by Opera Saratoga, with funding from The Arts Council of Ireland and Culture Ireland, the opera-theatre work employs the talents of some of Ireland’s leading creative artists: composer Emma O’Halloran and librettist Naomi Louisa O’Connell, with electronic sound design by Alex Dowling.

Performed by Opera Saratoga Festival Artists Sadie Spivey, Chase Sanders, and Brennan Martinez, with actress Anny DeGange Holgate, pianist Abigail Wilemon, and music director Laurie Rogers, the work-in-progress performance will be directed by Annie Saunders.

This project is funded in part by The Arts Council of Ireland and Culture Ireland.