The question at the heart of Francis Poulenc's opera "La Voix humaine" is simple and lasting: how can we be together if we have to be apart?

A woman tries to make contact with her ex-lover, simultaneously enabled and frustrated by her only connection to the outside world: the telephone. She crafts a world out of her loneliness that increasingly betrays itself as an illusion. In the grips of a pandemic, the possibility and importance of human contact has become one of our most pressing issues. How can we be together when the imperative is distance? What is the effect of forced or intentional separation on a human being? When we must stay apart, does technology bring us together, or does it simply create an illusion of closeness?

Francis Poulenc's and Jean Cocteau's monodrama from 1958 rings true over sixty years later, as this new production of "La Voix humaine" asks the question: how is a woman seen and heard when she remains alone?