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Billie and Zelda is both a theater piece and an opera which run concurrently. The work is about children lost through death, being heard and found, and the ability of telling the story to heal these wounds. Billie, the opera, is about Clara and her son, Billie, who is killed on D-Day. It is the story of a mother's crushing grief and her dead son's need to be released. The theater piece, Zelda, is about an exotic and headstrong child. One winter day, she pesters her mother so that she is sent outside to play where she sits stubbornly for hours. Severely chilled, she catches pnemonia and dies. She then haunts not only her own family, but the generations to come.
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