"In a Grove" among NYT's Best Performances of 2025

Mikaela Bennett and John Brancy in “In a Grove" at Prototype Festival 2025 (credit Maria Baranova)

Each January, the iconoclastic Prototype Festival starts off the year with new variations on its punk-noir aesthetic for opera. This year’s highlight was Christopher Cerrone and Stephanie Fleischmann’s “In a Grove,” a taut, time-bending meditation on truth and violence. Presented in an immersive minimalist staging at La MaMa, the opera reimagined Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s short story as a frontier ghost story set in a postapocalyptic forest. Cerrone’s score, flickering with subtle electronic effects, moved like a single surging organism that conjured a mood of psychological unrest. The cast, led by a dangerously magnetic John Brancy, turned each testimony into another shard of an exquisitely fractured puzzle. 

Corinna de Fonseca-Wollheim called the opera "a taut, time-bending meditation on truth and violence" and praised the "immersive minimalist staging" and score that "moved like a single surging organism".

Read original NYT review here