Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek collaborated with writer Jordan Tannahill to create this original story. They wanted to tell a modern tale about curdling power and were drawn to stories of cults, and The Listeners' plot “was an idea that wouldn't let us go,” Vavrek says. The creators hope to build an opera that feels like a suspenseful documentary you'd binge, from familiar vernacular down to video confessionals.

When people feel powerless, burdened and lonely and someone makes them feel heard and offers to stick up for them, like Howard does, there's an obvious enticement – and Mazzoli wants us to feel that pull. Four years after the enforced isolation of the pandemic, we're facing a national loneliness epidemic so bad the surgeon general is urging us to just join a book club already instead of staying home alone binging Manson documentaries. Who wouldn't want to join “an automatic community that loves you unconditionally,” as Mazzoli puts it?

“We're still feeling disconnected from our fellow community members, and there's a real danger in a charismatic leader pretending to kind of offer a kind of connective tissue when really it's creating more divisiveness,” Blain-Cruz says. Maybe that charismatic leader will build bridges and enact changes positive for all society. Or maybe that leader will brag about assaulting women, tell people to drink bleach when crisis strikes, and direct cult members under their sway to attack the seat of government.

Set in the American West where, per Blain-Cruz, intimacy and vastness interlace, The Listeners is not an explicitly political or feminist opera, Mazzoli says. But growing up as a woman in Pennsylvania and existing in the context of the politics of the country in which she lives “infects and affects the work,” the composer explains. The Listeners premiered in Norway in 2022, and returning to it this fall, Mazzoli says, there “is a pretty clear parallel to what is happening right now.

That's because The Listeners tells the story of a man who abuses his charm, but it also tells the story of a woman who has been told to wait her turn, swallow her ambition and tread a “line of acceptable behavior [that] is razor thin,” as Mazzoli puts it. This summer in the United States, we saw a radical plot-twist when President Joe Biden stepped away from the campaign and Kamala Harris, the first female, Black and Asian American vice president and now the second woman to be a major party's presidential nominee, stepped into the ring to face Donald Trump. 

Mazzoli “has devoted so much of her writing to telling stories of women in impossible situations,” librettist Vavrek says, and The Listeners carries that torch. “We're still living in a time when there's not a lot of imagination happening when we think about what a woman can do,” Mazzoli says, and she sees Claire's arc as a response to that lack of imagination and stifling of women's potential. 

Like a hungry coyote in the desert, a woman boxed in can curl up and give in – or she can find a way to persist in a pressure-cooker environment where, Blain-Cruz says, “the beauty and the terror coexist.”

Alexandra Svokos, MBA, is the senior digital editor of the financial magazine Kiplinger. She covered the 2016 election for Elite Daily and was the senior editor at ABC News’ site during the 2020 election.