IN Series Announces 2026-27 Season

In our conversation back in March, IN Series Artistic Director Timothy Neslon told me that “in a moment like the one we are living through, it is the privilege, but also the responsibility, of organizations like ours — small, nimble, independent, unaffiliated — to stand up and say and do something,” and he told me to expect a 2026–2027 IN Series season “that is directly connected to the conversation of the body politic, but is based on living out our values in the work we make.”

Sic Semper Tyrannis is the title IN Series is giving their 2026–2027 season, an exploration of tyranny and resistance throughout the ages — and in our own time. Look forward to four experiences with this opera company whose motto is “Opera that speaks. Theater that sings.”:

• THE M.A.K.A.DO: Make America Kingly Again! An Operatico-Politico-Buffo-Satirico reimagines Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado for our own time. Set in a gaudy, gilded Oval Office, this production will leave few unscathed, regardless of ideological bent. The scoring is in the style of a band from the John Philip Sousa era. 
• (N)O King(S) includes music from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Composers Judith Weir, Peter Maxwell Davies and Luciano Berio will be featured, as well as the first full staging in the United States of the opera Into the Little Hill with music by George Benjamin to a libretto by Martin Krimp.
• George Frideric Handel’s Theodora, one of his last oratorios, has sometimes been staged (including a production by Timothy Nelson’s mentor and friend Peter Sellars at the 1996 Glyndebourne Festival). Ostensibly a story of the Roman persecution of Christians in the early fourth century, it explores all-too-timely themes of freedom of conscience.
• The Triumph of F.A.U.V.E.L. – An Ass! draws upon the medieval Roman de Fauvel, a satiric fantasy about a donkey (whose name is an acronym of six of the seven deadly sins) who becomes ruler of the world. This IN Series production, with a new text by Andrew Albin, is a partnership with Brooklyn-based early music ensemble Alkemie and will include a New York performance as well as stagings in Washington and Baltimore.

I spoke with Timothy Nelson about this upcoming season.