Castor has driven all the way from Buffalo, New York, to the home of his cousin Patience in the American South. He’s got his wife, Celeste, and their two teenage kids in tow. On the surface, they’re making good on a long overdue family reunion, but deep down, there’s a crisis the couple is hoping to resolve.

This highly anticipated world premiere is the talk of the opera world. It tells a story that is both timeless and topical, addressing America’s warring tensions between reckoning with the hard facts of history and racing blindly forward toward the dream of progress. Castor and Patience features powerful, soaring new music by Gregory Spears, composer of our acclaimed 2016 commission Fellow Travelers, and a libretto by Pulitzer Prize-winning recent U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith.