Becoming an opera librettist was, for me, a natural extension of years spent working as a playwright in downtown New York theater and experimental music-theater. That fertile stomping ground provided an immersion into the dramaturgy of space and sound, the architectonics of tension, duration, and alternate modes of language and narrative. Writing for theater, I find inspiration everywhere I look: in literature and art; in objects and their histories; in philosophical questions and crises ranging from the local to the global; in myths, fairy tales, found photos, and on the street. But I have rarely, if ever, considered the work of a contemporary writer or filmmaker as viable terrain for playmaking—or remaking. As I first began to explore the possibility of writing for opera, I found its predilection for adaptation curious.
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