Gay Canadian writer Royce Vavrek and American composer Missy Mazzoli are finally making their Lyric Opera of Chicago debut with The Listeners, a contemporary thriller about a strange, sound-induced cult movement that rises in the U.S. Southwest.
Lyric co-commissioned and co-produced The Listeners with Norwegian National Opera and Ballet (which presented the world premiere in 2022), and with Opera Philadelphia, which staged it last year.
An earlier Lyric debut slated for Vavrek and Mazzoli was thwarted twice by the COVID-19 pandemic. Their 2018 chamber opera Proving Up, about Nebraska homesteaders, was part of the Lyric’s 2020-21 season (which was entirely scrapped), and was canceled again in 2022 when the Omicron variant of COVID-19 was surging.
According to Vavrek, COVID also shuffled the scheduled Chicago debut of The Listeners. This is why a completely different staging of The Listeners squeaked in this past January in Essen, Germany, before its Lyric premiere.
“That’s kind of amazing for a brand-new American grand opera,” Vavrek said. “Within three years, to have four presentations is quite a thing.”
But both Mazzoli and Vavrek’s previous work has been presented by other Chicago area institutions. In 2016, Chicago Fringe Opera staged Song from the Uproar: The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt. It wasMazzoli and Vavrek’s first collaboration from 2012 and was inspired by a Victorian-era Swiss explorer and Islamic convert who often presented as male.
And from 2018 to 2021, Mazzoli was the Mead Composer-in-Residence for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which has performed her orchestral and piano works like Orpheus Undone and Bolts of Loving Thunder. In 2021, Chicago Opera Theater presented an online screening of Vavrek and composer Matthew Recio’s The Puppy Episode (an opera inspired by people’s reactions to a celebrity like Ellen DeGeneres coming out via a sitcom) and Northwestern University staged Vavrek and composer David T. Little’s 2012 chamber opera Dog Days in 2019.
Vavrek has repeatedly proven himself to be one of the world’s most sought-after opera librettists, collaborating with more than a dozen different composers since 2010. Vavrek has written more than 20 opera librettos with composers such as David T. Little (JFK), Mikael Karlsson (Fanny and Alexander), Ricky Ian Gordon (27—a 2014 work inspired by Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas) and Du Yun (Angel’s Bone—the 2017 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music).
“I’ve surrounded myself with these composers who are all just ferociously singular in their outlook,” Vavrek said. “They’re all excited about the theatricality of opera and really investing in opera as a theatrical, musical medium and really telling stories and authoring the drama through their music.”
Mazzoli and Vavrek’s other collaborations include a 2016 opera version of director Lars von Trier’s 1996 film Breaking the Waves, and their forthcoming adaptation of the 2017 George Saunders novel Lincoln in the Bardo. It’s slated to open the 2026-27 season of the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
“Missy has always expressed that she doesn’t want opera only to be a place for adaptations,” said Vavrek, which is what led in part to their creation of an original work like The Listeners.
Gay Canadian author and filmmaker Jordan Tannahill, a friend of Vavrek since their college days at Concordia University in Montreal, was commissioned to write a narrative outline for the opera. Tannahill then subsequently wrote his own 2021 novel also called The Listeners, and he adapted that into a four-episode TV miniseries for the BBC that starred Rebecca Hall in 2024.
“We wrote our opera separate from (Tannahill),” Vavrek said. “It’s kind of like twins who were separated at birth and who were given completely different rearing environments.”
The Listeners opera focuses on Claire Devon, a suburban mother who is haunted by an unending, low-frequency sound that she initially thinks only affects her. But then Claire finds a community of others who also hear that hum, and they soon start to resemble a cult when they coalesce around a corrupt leader.
Vavrek said he and Mazzoli were initially drawn to the idea of The Listeners due to a proliferation of documentaries and dramatic miniseries about cults and fringe religious movements where “seemingly normal middle-American people could be caught up in these really, really strange communities.”
“But also, you totally understand because these people are searching for something,” Vavrek said. “These platitudes that these leaders say, sometimes they’re just like a direct arrow to the heart and they really connect, and it’s amazing to see who is susceptible that kind of rhetoric.”
American soprano Nicole Heaston makes her Lyric debut as Claire Devon, a role she originated in Oslo and repeated last year. Other holdovers from the Opera Philadelphia production include baritone John Moore in his Lyric debut and baritone Joseph Lim (an alum of the Lyric’s Ryan Opera Center).
The Listeners also stars Lyric veterans like Kyle Ketelsen (Don Giovanni, Ariodante), Daniela Mack (Rusalka),Jonas Hacker (Fellow Travelers) and Zachary Nelson (La Bohème from the 2018-19 season). Lyric music director Enrique Mazzola conducts, while director Mikhaela Mahony is re-staging director Lileana Blain-Cruz’s original production.
Vavrek acknowledges that The Listeners at the Lyric might not have the luster and media attention of a world premiere. But Vavrek said Chicago audiences will get to see the polished, finished product after so many changes and “sculpting of the material” that went on in Oslo and Philadelphia.
Vavrek is happy to be in Chicago promoting The Listeners and lending support and sharing insights for the cast and crew. And though Proving Up still has yet to be seen in Chicago, Vavrek is glad that he and Mazzoli will finally be able to make their Lyric debut with another one of their critically acclaimed collaborations.
“What I love about Missy is her extraordinary music, yes, but it’s also her curiosity and her willingness to go on really wild adventures with me,” Vavrek said. “I’ve truly met an artistic soul mate with her.”
The Listeners makes its Lyric Opera of Chicago debut for five performances only from March 30 to April 11 at 20 N. Wacker Dr. Performances are at 2 p.m. Sunday, March 30, 7:30 p.m. Saturday, April 5 and 7 p.m. Wednesday, Tuesday and Friday, April 2, 8 and 11. Tickets are $59 to $355. Call 312-827-5600 or visit LyricOpera.org.