Event

ICONS/IDOLS

ICONS/IDOLS: The Eunuchs Part One: "Prinkipo"

Book and Lyrics by Helen Banner
Music by Grace Oberhofer
Direction by Colette Robert
Music direction by Robert Frost

Over 1200 years before Hillary, Kamala, and Kirsten, there was Irene, Euphrosyne and Theodora. ICONS/IDOLS is a tetralogy of choral plays that recovers the secret history of three Byzantine empresses as they ascend in a society rife with animosity towards female rule. Deeply committed to religious icons, these empresses bargain happiness for power in an attempt to re-introduce iconography to the Byzantine Empire. In PRINKIPO, the second play of the tetralogy, three renegade eunuchs sail to the island of Prinkipo to tempt the exiled nun Euphrosyne with a return to power if she agrees to marry the violent peasant soldier they have just made Emperor.

The development of ICONS/IDOLS received funding from OPERA America's Opera Grants for Female Composers program, supported by the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation.

ICONS/IDOLS has been developed in The Jam, New Georges performance lab for early career female artists, and was developed in part at Ice Factory 2016, a program of New Ohio Theatre.