OperaDelaware will present a Staged Workshop of Michael Ching's new opera Slaying the Dragon on Saturday, February 18th at 6:30 pm at Opera Studios, 4 South Poplar Street, Wilmington, DE. The cost is $10 at the door.
Music by Michael Ching
Libretto by Ellen Frankel
Inspired by a true story.
Based on the book "Not By The Sword" by Kathryn Watterson
Directed by Leland Kimball
In the early 1990's, Larry Trapp, Grand Dragon of the Nebraska Ku Klux Klan, conducted a hate campaign against minority groups in the predominantly white city of Lincoln. But when Cantor Michael and Julie Weisser reached out to this white supremacist, despite his anti-Semitic threats, Trapp turned his back on bigotry, converted to Judaism, and campaigned for tolerance until he died in the Weissers' home from advanced diabetes at the age of 42. Trapp's story has inspired several imagined and documentary works, most notably Kathryn Watterson's 1995 journalistic account, Not By the Sword (which will be reissued by the University of Nebraska Press in 2012 with a new introduction by Ellen Frankel).