The late James Jorden, Observer’s opera critic from 2014 through 2021, once wrote: “Season after season, PROTOTYPE introduces to New York pieces that shift the whole paradigm of what opera is and can be.” Nothing has changed. The ever-innovative festival returned earlier this month for its eleventh season, with works that consider motherhood, music history and the legacies of racism that haunt families and institutions alike. To give you a taste of what you missed, we’ve rounded up the first week’s shows below.

To be or not to be (a mother)? This was the question at the center of Dutch singer-songwriter Wende’s The Promise, which turned the cozy HERE arts space into something resembling an underground show. The Promise, fresh off a successful run at the Royal Court Theater in London, is a rock-pop song cycle, loosely cohering around the crises of identity that come with the transition from young- to full adulthood: sexual curiosity, fear of loneliness, feeling lost and of, course, the crossroads of the child decision. With words contributed by five London-based female playwrights (EV Crowe, Debris Stevenson, Stef Smith, Somalia Seaton, and Sabrina Mahfouz), The Promise is at once relatable and sometimes texture-less. Some memorable lines appear here and there—one song envisioned life as a series of moves… “moving into a spouse, into a fridge, into the dark of a screen”—but imaginations of motherhood and the eventual choice to be childless feel divorced from the details that make each experience unique. The music runs the gamut from Fiona Apple-style indie to barstool singalong ballad to punk show, cementing Wende as a versatile songwriter and, one hopes, more fully introducing her work to an American audience. Wende is a consummate performer—alternately generous, neurotic and wrathful with a voice that shivers and snarls—but the show meanders in its Hamlet-esque consideration of its central question.

A female mystic by the name of Julian of Norwich once characterized the whole of God’s creation as a hazelnut. Seeing it, she asks, “‘What may this be?’ The answer: ‘It is all that is made.’” She marvels at its littleness—how could something so tiny contain so much?

Heather Christian’s Terce: A Practical Breviary, riffs on Julian’s words along with others from Hildegard of Bingen and of Robin Wall Kimmerer, in an off-beat, energetic and tremendously moving new take on the 9 a.m. prayers. The project, which takes folk, gospel and medieval organum and blends them into something miraculous, looks for the Divine Feminine in all creation, reaching to heaven while rooting its feet firmly in the earth. It’s a show that is both polished—Keenan Tyler Oliphant’s direction and Nick Vaughan and Jake Margolin’s stunning environmental design take care of that—but also earnestly rough around the edges. Not all of the performers are professional, but they bring an unmatched energy, as if diving into the rich loam of Christian’s music and emerging with hands full of growing things,........

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