The Comet (2024)

Set in 1920s New York City, The Comet is an experimental short story by civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois that depicts a Black man and white woman as the only survivors after a comet hits Earth. The narrative explores what could happen when what Du Bois called “The Veil” of white supremacy was suddenly removed through this extreme cosmic action. The wealthy young white woman Julia and the black worker Jim begin to envision the possibility of love and change, as well as the necessity to find effective solutions to the many problems of free will, agency, and systems of class, gender and racial hegemony that had been suppressed by the social world, right up to the onset of the catastrophe.

In its premiere run of performances, The Comet is paired with Claudio Monteverdi’s L'incoronazione di Poppea, an Italian opera from 1643 unfolding among the social divisions of ancient Rome. According to director Yuval Sharon, The Comet / Poppea explores exclusion in classical music by creating an uneasy tessellation between the Baroque and the contemporary and enacting the experience of double consciousness. The work begins as a critique of the institution of opera and ends as a justification of the art form’s radical potential. Presented on a turntable divided in two halves, the disparate worlds of The Comet and Poppea unfold simultaneously, with the stage’s rotation creating a visual and sonic spiral for audiences—inviting associations, dissociations, collisions, and confluences.