It has become common in recent decades for directors to recast works of inherited repertoire on the American frontier — from Francesca Zambello’s “American” Ring cycle to an array of Elixir and Così productions set in the Wild West. A new exhibition at OPERA America’s National Opera Center makes the case that Orfeo ed Euridice deserves a similar reimagining.

The Orfeo production concept on view, which transports Gluck’s opera to the 1930s Dust Bowl, is the work of director Katherine Wilkinson, scenic designer Sarah Nietfeld, costume designer Maureen Freedman, lighting designer Christina Tang, and choreographer Allison Plamondon. They are winners of the 2021 Robert L.B. Tobin Director- Designer Prize, a program that identifies the field’s most promising directors and designers. Using funding from the prize, the team developed their production concept for a presentation at Opera Conference 2022 and the current exhibition.

Wilkinson arrived at her treatment for Orfeo during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. “In the summer of 2020, when we began to develop this project, COVID raged, we didn’t have vaccines, and unemployment benefits had just lapsed,” she explains. Wilkinson began researching other periods in American history when society endured intense hardships, experienced collective grief, and ultimately rebounded. She landed on the Great Depression. “I kept thinking about what it meant to descend into Hades and then return, as Orfeo does, to a brighter future,” Wilkinson adds.

The team imagines the action beginning on a bleak, sand-covered farm, moving to an Underworld reminiscent of a claustrophobic barn, and arriving at a lush Elysium blanketed in ox-eye sunflowers (native to the Great Plains). Drawing from sources like Clyfford Styll’s paintings, Freedman has envisioned “sandblasted” costumes inspired by 1930s silhouettes, while Plamondon looked to Depression-era dance marathons and Kubler-Ross’ stages of grief to develop her choreography.

The Orfeo production will be on view at the Opera Center through this spring. The final winning team from the 2021 Director-Designer Prize will have their work featured in an exhibition later this year.