Suor Angelica by G. Puccini

Set in a seventeenth-century convent, Giacomo Puccini’s Suor Angelica follows a young nun who has spent seven years in seclusion after being forced to abandon her illegitimate child. When her aristocratic aunt arrives to demand that Angelica renounce her inheritance, she also reveals that the child died two years earlier. Overcome by grief, Angelica takes her own life, only to realize in her final moments that suicide may have separated her from the son she longs to see again. In the opera’s transcendent conclusion, a vision of the Virgin Mary and the child offers Angelica forgiveness, reconciliation, and peace.

This production reimagines that final hour of grief as something closer to memory itself — a life relived in its last moments, suspended between what was lived and what was lost.

SUOR ANGELICA

MUSIC BY
Giacomo Puccini

LIBRETTO BY
Giovacchino Forzano

LOCATION

The Sam, at the Flea Theater
20 Thomas St, New York, NY 10007

SUNG IN
Italian with English Supertitles

RUNNING TIME
65 minutes, without intermission

ACCESSIBILITY
The Flea and all Teatro Grattacielo productions are wheelchair accessible and disability-friendly. Please contact us in advance for any specific accommodation needs.

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Director’s Statement

Puccini himself ends Suor Angelica in hallucination — as Angelica dies, reality dissolves into a vision of the Virgin Mary and her son, a moment where the borders of the real are already breaking down. This production takes that blurring, which Puccini reserved for the final minutes, and extends it across the entire opera. Rather than unfolding as a linear convent drama, the piece becomes the interior world of a dying woman, her whole life relived in the space of an hour.

Angelica remains fixed in a single, isolated bed — the only solid, unmoving reality on stage — while every other figure she has ever known returns to her as a ghost: the sisters of her convent, the rituals of her daily life, the aunt who brings her ruin, the child she was made to give up. Staged entirely in black and white, populated by figures who are present and absent at once, this production asks what it means to spend one’s final hour not living, but remembering — and whether the line between memory, hallucination, and grace was ever as fixed as it seems.