Tonight, Pittsburgh Opera will set the stage to “Time to Act’s” world premiere. A new opera whose setting is a modern day high school and whose characters are teenagers, the opera’s slogan is “build the world you want to see.” The students’ preparation for a production of Sophocles’ classic Greek tragedy, “Antigone,” quickly turns into a parallel story of a community finding healing in the aftermath of gun violence, loss and trauma.

According to Pittsburgh Opera, “’Time to Act’ demonstrates how the arts can uplift and unify victims of trauma, empowering them to act, while giving voice to the young citizens who have been most impacted by an ongoing cycle of devastating school violence.”

2021 to 2024 were record years of increased school shootings, including Robb Elementary School in Uvalde where 19 children were killed along with two educators. 2025 saw at least 78 school shootings with 122 injured and 32 killed, two of which were students (a ten-year-old and an eight-year-old) who were shot while in mass at Annunciation Catholic School’s church. There have already been six school shootings in the United States two months into this new year.

The opera’s composer Laura Kaminsky has been riding a formidable wave of success with her acclaimed and wildly popular opera “As One.” Librettist Crystal Manich also has a resume to be spoken for; traveling worldwide for her work directing operas, musicals, film and the circus. OperaWire spoke with both women on how this production is meant to encourage audiences it’s “time to act.”

OperaWire: What was your inspiration for creating this opera?

Crystal Manich: So in 2018, after the Parkland shooting, Kostis Protopapas from Opera Santa Barbara gave me a call and said that he was really inspired by the young people in Parkland who were leading the charge in protests and talking to the media about how we should no longer tolerate gun violence in schools. It really inspired him to think about what if a group of drama kids had been affected by a school shooting in some way and how the ultimate message of the opera would be that the play they were working on had more significance in their lives now, more than they thought. I started writing a draft that year in 2018. I was actually in the middle of writing that first draft when I was directing “Hansel and Gretel” here in Pittsburgh and the Tree of Life Shooting happened. That was something that really affected me directly just from being a mile away from that tragedy on that day. In 2021, Kostis came back to me and said, “I’m doing ‘As One’ at Opera Santa Barbara and Laura Kaminsky might be interested in this topic,” and I didn’t believe him, because I was like, well, Laura is a tried and true composer, and I’ve never written a libretto. But sure enough, we had a zoom call. By 2022, we had met in person and it was really at the Opera America conference in 2023 here in Pittsburgh where Laura and I went hard on pitching this idea to a lot of companies and that’s where we eventually got our co-commissioners. Pittsburgh Opera was very dedicated to being the lead commissioner from the beginning.

OW: What was the reason behind using Antigone as the play the drama kids were working on in Time To Act’s plot? What are the parallels?

CM: That was Kostis’s idea. He really thought about how relatable the Greek tragedies still are and in an opera being able to reference something classical while talking about something very contemporary. I definitely saw a lot of parallels between what happens in the play and what might be happening with Alona, who in our plot is the sister of the man who did the shooting at the school one year prior. We obviously have a lot of opinions about the people who are related to these perpetrators. The way to find empathy and unity is really what the opera’s about. She’s definitely a parallel character to Antigone who has two brothers who fight on opposing sides of a war. They both die and one of them is called the patriot while the other one’s the traitor. Antigone wants to bury her traitor brother but her uncle King Creon doesn’t want that to happen because he wants to make an example of him to the state. So, it’s all about that conflict with politics and morals. We do have a big theme in the opera where we talk about why someone so young has to die for something that they believe in.

OW: How does this story explore themes of how complex humanity is?

Laura Kaminsky: I thought Crystal was fascinating and I knew of her work as a director. So that was a motivator because she’s definitely someone who sees things on stage. One of the things that is important to me in all of the operas that I engage in is not just writing a beautiful score that people are going to like the music, but to delve into all of the human emotional issues that make us function in the world–in the context of the social, political, cultural worlds that we live in. So it was important for me, not just to relive this ancient Greek story but to make each of these characters three-dimensional, so that they are all sympathetic at times and perhaps even alienating at times. People are complex. There’s this idea we explore of can you still love someone who’s done something terrible? Can you love someone or respect someone who is maintaining their commitment to the person who did someone terrible. It challenges all of those different kinds of human reactions to deed, belief, and emotion.

OW: Laura, what was your process in composing the music?

LK: One of the things that’s really important to me in doing opera, as opposed to abstract instrumental music, is that what we’re trying to do is to not just have sung words that sound pretty in a voice, but that all of those words are sung by specific people who have personalities. I have to see them in my mind’s eye which is why I always say that I’m a visual composer. I start to imagine what this all looks like and how each character physically moves and what their energy is. They are to be sung differently because each character has a different story. I went back and forth with Crystal on the sonic landscape. I don’t do things unilaterally. As the landscape comes together, the musical motives create the motifs woven throughout the piece.

OW: Where do you draw inspiration for your composition style?

LK: (laughs) I often get accused of making very complex rhythms in my music. I lived and worked in West Africa and Ghana for over a year and studied drumming every single day, surrounded by it. I’m fascinated by polyrhythms and mixed meters. A few years later, I lived and worked in Eastern Europe and traveled to, I think 11 countries. I produced music all over and on tour I was studying all Eastern European and Central European music, both folk and classical. So all of those irregular meters are just natural to me. 11/8 is like a completely comfortable meter. I write a lot of groove, and I place them in unusual places. I tell the people reading my scores “just be in the groove.” Until that happens, it feels like it’s a lot of work to count, and it is. I’m not gonna deny it. But this company went to that place of understanding all these rhythms. The opera has a rhythmic pulse that shifts to support the emotional storytelling, and it’s very jazzy at times—lots of crunchy harmonies. The harmonies could be seen as the angst-filled harmonies of the post-World War II era or even American jazz. It’s the same language, really. I don’t think about chords. I just think about color.

OW: Are there any motifs throughout the opera?

LK: Crystal had a brilliant idea at the very beginning. One of the ways that this community of young actors in this drama club comes together, is they do clapping rhythm exercises and toss a ball around to each other. They have to attend to each other’s changing of rhythm so that they all become one. And that became a leitmotif throughout the piece.

OW: You are both two women who created this opera and are leading the charge on this world premiere. How do you think your identities help push opera forward?

LK: We were hanging out with our whole design team, which is all women, in fact the only man in the room is our maestro (Michael Sakir). That’s when we realized we’re a team of almost all women which we never talked about or realized before.

CM: I think about my journey–I’m mid-career-–so I think about the teams I want to have around me. I work with a lot of men that I love but it wasn’t necessarily a conscious choice on this project but more so I know that the people I’m working with are the right people for this particular project. I feel like I’m at the point where I just want to create work with people that speak to me and speak the same language as me. In fact, our set and costume designer (Lindsay Fuori) is from Sandy Hook, Connecticut, and so she was in high school when the Sandy Hook tragedy happened. She has been a truth mirror for me for eight years because she’s read a lot of drafts of this opera and has heavily influenced the content by telling me her story of the lockdown that she had to go through that day. That particular experience inspired Alona’s monologue in the opera because it’s Lindsay’s own experience. It’s so important to have people’s lived experience represented when we do works like this.

OW: What message do you hope audiences receive with this opera?

CM: There’s a double reference. The students say “time to act” because it’s literally acting class. Then it changes when they recognize that Alona, being who she is and what she’s been through, that it is time for them to take action, in order to inspire people through the play to make changes on whatever the societal mentality is, and whatever the problems are. That we can come to the middle and try to resolve them rather than staying on opposite sides of an argument. We have to stop fighting about things that are not necessarily going to change in the short term, like with politics or laws, but rather take a deeper look. What is the psychology of what we are living now and why does this continue to happen? Is it something within ourselves that we have to change? No politician is going to change our mentality. We have to do that.

LK: And while we don’t make a particular case about 2nd Amendment rights, we are asking all these questions. We’re asking, what does it mean to live in a society where children are taught to protect themselves against the potential of a bad person coming in and shooting them all. What does that mean for how we live and how do we change that?

CM: I think the other thing that’s so powerful to me is how we weave the ancient story with the contemporary, is how the students start to discover things when they engage with this ancient text and then they see this contemporary reality in their lives. It makes them realize the power of art across time, that it transcends its time and place. There are universal and human truths in it, and it gives them a place to sort through their own feelings. Then it inspires them to build a community together as they grapple with these human issues. That’s what we think art is for, which is why it’s always considered scary and powerful, and often gets banned or challenged because it goes to these places. Even the arts are in peril right now. However, the ultimate messages of hope in the show proves the arts can overcome all of these anxieties and these tragedies.

LK: And while the issue of gun violence is clearly at the center of this, the final words are really “build the world you want to see.” It could be about another issue you’re passionate about like climate change. I’d love people to walk out of the theater and be talking about how those kids really cared. Like “look how they came together. Gee, what do I care about?” That’s what art can do. Like we had an amazing experience throughout this production. Everyone was vulnerable, open and dedicated. And what a great metaphor for how we could make a better world.

CM: I also want people to take away that opera is really still a viable art form. Music is inherent in all of our bodies. We respond to music and it lives within us. The effect that opera can have on a story like this is huge. And I think emotionally, people will carry it with them for a long time.

In addition to tonight’s performance, Pittsburgh Opera will be showing “Time To Act” on March 3, 6, 7, and 8.