Premiere 2026 @ The Skirball Center NYU
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Barcelona, Map of Shadows is a mysterious story of the rented rooms in a rented apartment in an upper middle class neighborhood, and its terminally ill lease holder whose dying request is to be left alone with his wife. In 5 perplexing scenes, he and his wife ask their tenants – a French teacher, a second string soccer player/security guard, and an immigrant line cook – to leave, as a radio broadcast of Callas singing La Boheme plays intermittently in the background. In each encounter the contradictions and secret entanglements of their lives are revealed alongside the past and future of their city, haunted by the Spanish Civil War and the erasure of its cultural identity due to globalization. Like the city in which they live, the characters’ identities are not fixed, their shifting subjectivities undo the social codings of high and low class, masculine and feminine, center and margin. Far from being a story of gentrification and nostalgia,  it instead transports you to those mysterious, marginal, concealed spaces that exist in the realm of everyday urban life where identity is always elusive.

Co-Produced with American Opera Projects and the Skirball Center.

Barcelona, Map of Shadows is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.