Light streamed through the stained-glass windows of the Space at Irondale, once a church, during the Saturday matinée of Heather Christian’s Terce as part of the Prototype Festival.

Two months ago, when climate activists interrupted a performance of Tannhaüser at the Met, the banners they unfurled from the balconies announced, “no opera on a dead planet.”

The beginning of Mary Kouyoumdjian’s Adoration is marked by silence. The young Simon, played by Sammy Ivany, lies on his stomach, scribbling in a notebook.

We constantly wonder whether the young man will embrace him—or slit his throat.

Plink. A marble drops into a bowl. A brief yelp from glass, and a dozen, a hundred, a thousand years pass. Eventually the bowl is full of marbles, each one a tiny globe.

The performance of an opera, indeed, seems almost a third narrative, atop the dreamer under the scientific microscope and the larva turning into a butterfly, and the mingling is not always clear—but then, clarity never seems to be the intention.

Like everyone reading this, I imagine, I’ve missed going to see and hear something in person more than I thought possible.

The immediate and personal catastrophe interleaves with the general and universal and ancient.

Despite the ongoing pandemic and the political upheaval, the Prototype Festival is back, and it is bigger and more accessible than ever before.

The Murder of Halit Yozgat by Ben Frost and Petter Ekmann is flavorsome in its use of sound, vocal and otherwise, to explore the elements of the story, to keep you tied in, and guessing.