Juventas New Music Ensemble & OperaHub present Tramps, Emails & Hemlock
Seully Hall, Boston Conservatory, 8 The Fenway
March 18, 19, and 22 at 8 p.m., $6-$24 (20% discount if purchased through the Juventas web site)

J. Jacob Krause was demanding something unusual of some singers leaning over some unusual props: more salivation directed at the laptops, please. Bostonist had slipped into Seully Hall in the midst of a dress rehearsal, where OperaHub and Juventas were polishing an evening of Tramps, Emails & Hemlock. OperaHub, self-identified "freshest chamber opera company" in Boston, already has some unique productions under its belt, having performed an opera written in a concentration camp and catwalked an "opera fashion show" at Saint, so an evening of chamber opera would seem to be straightforward, but their collaboration with Juventas—an ensemble that performs new music by composers too young to run for president—is a surreal mix of styles, subject matter, and narrative technique.

In Marcus Karl Maroney's Dust of the Road, a family is transformed when they encounter Judas in the guise of a hobo; Conservatory alumna Christine McClintock's succinctly-titled Re: is a triangle of emailing, Craigslisting, texting, and pining; and Peter MacMurray's A Rooster for Asclepius depicts the last days of Socrates. Bostonist was especially struck by the works' eclectic sources of text—their libretti drawn, respectively, from a short, allegorical play, found fragments of electronic communications, and multiple accounts of an ancient historical event. The latter embroiders upon the incident with mythological doppelgangers for every character—a mask transforms the dying Socrates into the deified healer Asclepius, while his guard expounds upon the properties and uses of hemlock as a begoggled Chiron, his voice heavier than his entire body mass.

All three operas, running about twenty minutes each, are performed by young, local singers with stage direction by Krause. Re:'s staging is the least literal of these, with its tangle of overlapping monologues reaching out for each other in the dark (and in the office) until the characters meet, finally, awkwardly, stuck in a subway train stuck in a tunnel. If this sounds like it could be confusing, that's because it uncannily captures the web of confessions, assumptions, retroactive crushes, and oblique clues that comprise the semi-connections of Craigslist.

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Top, right: Sheena Ramirez, mezzo-soprano, and Brendan Buckley, tenor, in Re:. Left: Taylor Horner, bass, in A Rooster For Asclepius.