Heartbeat Opera, known for their innovative and often provocative restagings of opera classics, celebrated their company’s tenth season with their first-ever commission: Daniel Schlosberg’s The Extinctionist, which sets Amanda Quaid’s libretto, adapted from her short play of the same name which premiered in 2019.

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Sung well by its small cast, briskly directed by Shadi Gaheri, and with beautiful visuals by Kate Noll (sets) and Camilla Tassi (projections), The Extinctionist showed that Heartbeat deserves its reputation for compelling opera theater, but the opera’s sanctimonious libretto and an ill-conceived puppet baby led to an evening more frustrating than triumphant.

As the name suggests, this is an opera about climate change, and more specifically, the decision to have or not to have children in a world that feels like it’s hurtling toward destruction. It starts with a familiar morning scene: a woman doom-scrolling in bed, her anxiety mounting as each apocalyptic image slides by. She and her husband have been trying for a baby for five months, but as their frustration mounts in conjunction with her climate panic, she doubts the ethics of this choice. She considers tubal ligation but ultimately has to confront her fears that she might not have much of a choice after all.

Schlosberg’s music, scored for a large percussion section, electric guitar, piano and violin/viola moves between lush tonality and atonal chaos, with dashes of free jazz, rock and muzak. It had some very strong moments—sly, propulsive rhythms throughout, a memorable extended solo that saw percussionist Katherine Fortunato playing timpani with her right hand and xylophone with her left, some downright lovely writing for the........

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