There is smoke in the air. Not just in California but everywhere, in the slow erosion of freedoms, in the tightening grip of forces that would silence curiosity, stifle love, and control what we dare to imagine. Opera has always been an art that tell these stories with urgency, pride, and profound artistic conviction.

A Story for This Moment

Set in a makeshift school run by nuns in the charred ruins of a California town, The School for Girls Who Lost Everything in the Fire follows three teenage girls — Seline, Melanie, and Ginger — who have lost everything and are now subject to the repressive order of those who claim to protect them. Sleepless and trapped by lingering smoke, the girls grow delirious beneath strict convent rule while a shadowy figure known only as the Barn Man terrorizes their nights. When a secret queer romance between Seline and Melanie is discovered, friendships shatter and a guilt none of them can name comes rushing to the surface.

The resonance is impossible to ignore. In an era when the right to love freely, to learn without censorship, and to imagine a life beyond prescribed boundaries is under threat, this opera speaks with shattering clarity. Its teenage heroines, queer, traumatized, fiercely alive, are not relics of another time. They are of this time. Their story asks what it costs to grow and love in a haze of trauma. It asks what survives when everything else burns.

Drawing on the gothic and surreal traditions of Shirley Jackson, Samanta Schweblin, and Samantha Hunt, The School for Girls Who Lost Everything in the Fire renders its emotional truths through the intangible smoke that behaves like a living thing, dread that seeps through convent walls, imagination that becomes both weapon and refuge. Suleiman’s score gives the California wildfire landscape an almost sentient presence, while Fríes’s libretto pulses with the raw, unexamined humanity of teen girls coming of age.

In Their Own Words

“This opera contains all the ingredients of a mysterious, dramatic, multilayered operatic work, sex, love, death, mystery, intrigue, drama, suspense, religion, loss, tragedy, and even hints of the surreal and supernatural. Its setting in modern-day, fire-ravaged California speaks to the apocalyptic times we’re living in. The smoke is almost its own character, it never lets you forget its presence. We breathe it in.”

— Ryan Suleiman, Composer

“Within the unseen or unheard lives of teenage girls exists profound purity and wisdom, messiness and savagery, desire and love that still lives within our hearts as adults but in muted forms. I want to bring the raw humanity of teenage girls to the stage so that we can hear what they have to say about our shared humanity. At the heart of this opera is the devastating impact of repression, and the absolutely beautiful and dangerous power of a girl’s heart.”

— Cristina Fríes, Librettist