Lighting Designer

The Onion is a new opera in which family secrets collide with a memory-enhancing AI. Through contact with their younger selves, its characters bring to the surface the experiences that have shaped their lives: a sexist theft of scientific work, the vanishing of a parent, the erasure of a gender identity. Will the intervention of an AI hurt or heal?

The opera unfolds on an island in the Pacific Northwest where a neuroscientist has sequestered herself with her daughter to create the Onion, an AI device that allows anyone using it to re-live a personal memory. Rounding out the human roles are the Onion’s young co-inventor and the neuroscientist’s ex-partner. The Onion itself is a character in the opera: its independence and influence on the human characters seem to grow each time they use it.

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The Onion

Amherst College

Huntington Theatre

The champagne is on ice, the hors d'oeuvres are perfectly arranged, and the table is exquisitely set. At a swank Park Avenue apartment, a young couple is celebrating their engagement with an intimate gathering of family and friends. When a glass of wine is spilled, the night takes an unexpected turn, unleashing a spiraling sequence of events and revelations that will irrevocably change their lives.

The Engagement Party

Geffen Playhouse

Accomplished playwright and actor Halley Feiffer brings her sardonic, hilarious and tender play about connection in a time of loss to the Geffen Playhouse with the West Coast Premiere of A Funny Thing Happened

Lighting Designer

Matthew Richards

Events

Past events

11 - 26 Sep, 2025

The Onion · MassOpera

Oct 19 - Nov 5, 2023

The Engagement Party · Geffen Playhouse

About

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