LIFE MIRRORS ART WHEN TRUMP’S TRAVEL BAN INTERVENES.

The theme of ID, Please is of personal relevance for its creative team given that composer Soosan Lolavar was almost prevented from returning to the US to finish her opera in February 2017. Due to her status as an Iranian citizen, President Trump’s executive order barring travel from seven countries threatened her ability to return to the US to attend workshops and rehearsals. 

Lolavar had studied at Carnegie Mellon as Fulbright Scholar in 2015-2016, where she met and began working with Hirsch, an MFA student in playwriting at Carnegie Mellon at the time. Responding to the heated anti-immigrant rhetoric of the Brexit campaign in the UK and the Republican primaries in the US, Hirsch and Lolavar wanted to create a work that explored issues of foreignness, identity, and border crossing. During its initial conception in the spring of 2016, they couldn’t predict how real the frightening rhetoric would become. 

After returning to the UK to begin her Ph.D. at City University in London, Lolavar had planned to return to Pittsburgh to complete the opera in a February 2017 workshop at Carnegie Mellon. Five days before her scheduled flight, President Trump issued the first of the so-called “Muslim bans” making the possibility of her return seem unlikely. After a panicked week of airport protests and consultations with immigration attorneys, a federal judge struck down the ban and Lolavar was able to return to the US and was able to complete the piece.

As part of the development of the libretto, Hirsch interviewed real life individuals with experience crossing borders, both legally and illegally. (This was month’s before Lolavar herself faced issues crossing the border.) The music is composed in a way that fuses Iranian and Western traditions, particularly drawing on the complex rhythmic content of the improvised sections in Iranian music performance. It is written for Mezzo-Soprano, Countertenor, Baritone, and a fifteen-piece orchestra. 

ID, Please was first accepted to be developed in a collaboration between Pittsburgh Opera and Carnegie Mellon University as part of project called CoOpera. The first workshop was performed in a fully staged production at the Pittsburgh Opera headquarters on April 1, 2017. The vocalists, conductor, and design team from Carnegie Mellon also participated in the Tête à Tête Opera Festival in London in 2017 where it was performed by the UK-based Chroma Ensemble.