A stage version of “The Handmaid’s Tale” is coming to Boston.
The Margaret Atwood classic will serve as the 2018-2019 season-ending production for the Boston Lyric Opera. The company announced this week that the show will take over Lavietes Pavilion at the Harvard Athletics Complex, the country’s second-oldest college basketball arena that’s still in use, and the home of both the men’s and women’s basketball teams for Harvard University.
“The Handmaid’s Tale” will take to the stage at Lavietes Pavilion May 5-12, 2019.
“A show as large and exciting as ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ will resonate in a space of this magnitude and storied history,” BLO artistic and general director Esther Nelson said in a release. “I’m delighted we found a space that reflects the proportions and ambitions of this work and brings it home – in a sense – to some locations dramatized in Ms. Atwood’s original book.”
“The Handmaid’s Tale” has become a cultural phenomenon thanks to Hulu’s critically acclaimed adaptaion of the novel, which stars Elisabeth Moss. The actress plays Offred, the series’ protagonist who tries to rebel against the misogynistic class structure that dominates the dystopian society of the Republic of Gilead, which is the authoritarian Christian regime that takes over the United States. Much of the show is actually set in the Boston area, as everything from Fenway Park to the Boston Globe’s old offices have appeared in Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
The upcoming production is based off of a 2000 operatic adaptation of the novel by Danish composer Poul Ruders and librettist Paul Bentley. “The Handmaid’s Tale” has taken to the stage on several occasions in the past, including a 1989 Tufts University production written and directed by Bruce Shapiro.
If you go:
May 5-12, 2019, Lavietes Pavilion at Harvard Athletics Complex, 45 N Harvard St., Allston, blo.org
