I was looking at the ceiling, and then I saw the sky
This new musical is about the urgency of love and rehabilitating the only truly revolutionary emotion in a society fragmented to the point of falling apart.
The plot involves seven young people in Los Angeles today: white, Black, Salvadoran and Vietnamese, they are barely 25 years old. They belong to the generation that will plunge into 21st century and reveal the real face of America: diverse, heterogeneous, explosive. All are confronted with the joy and pain of romance, the small tremours and major earthquakes of love, and the realities of life today: single-parent families, AIDS, abortion, immigration, criminalization, barriers of all sorts. An earthquake disrupts the course of each couple’s lives, transforming relations and individuals. Ultimately, they all have the same hope: finding a way, any way, to give love another chance; there has to be some way out. No one dares write love stories like this anymore: electrifyingly contemporary, written resolutely for the present, its numerous variations buffeted and shaped by today’s political realities.
Directed by
Peter Sellars
Libretto by
June Jordan
Music by
John Adams
Co-produced by
Cal Performances (University of California, Berkeley)
Helsinki Festival (Finland)
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (New York)
MC 93 Bobigny (Paris)
Thalia Theater GmbH (Hamburg)
