New Orleans Opera is set to present Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” this March.

The opera will star Hiromi Omura and Bryan Hymel as well as Nina Yoshida Nelson, Weston Hurt, Julius Ahn, André Chiagn, and Hidenori Inoue. Aria Umezawa directs with Judith Yan conducting the Louisiana Philharmonic.

In a statement about the production, Umezawa noted that “In Puccini’s opera, the titular Butterfly has every reason to conjure a fantasy world for herself. The hardship she has endured incentivizes her to accept an offer: the opportunity to marry a man who will afford her the type of security she hasn’t known since the loss of her father. This offer becomes a lifeline and the stakes are high for the arrangement to succeed, but the longer Cio-Cio-San lets herself mistake fantasy for reality, the less she is able to accept the truth of her situation.

Umezawa continued, “in a similar way, we the audience, are emerging from our own periods of hardship, and the desire to escape into a fantasy world for some respite is appealing. But some of the onstage worlds we build are harming members of our community by perpetuating stereotypes and numbing us to violence committed against certain bodies – in the case of ‘Madama Butterfly,’ anti-Asian violence. When we are unaware of the fact that our fantasies have been constructed for us, and when we are not called upon to confront what we are witnessing, we are less able to recognize the truth – that these same narratives are playing out in the world around us: as an online comment, harassment on the street, or at its worst, as a shooting in Georgia.”

The opera opens on March 24 and will get a repeat performance on the 26^th.