Deborah Overes

An urban family that can’t seem to get along gets stranded in a remote, impoverished lumber town two days before Christmas. When they become involved in the town’s home-grown Christmas pageant, they not only help solve the town’s problems but learn to connect with each other just in time for the holidays.

FIG TREES is a documentary opera about AIDS activists Tim McCaskell of Toronto and Zackie Achmat of Capetown as they fight for access to treatment drugs. Documentary interviews, speeches, press conferences and demonstrations are sampled, taken apart, and set to music, replayed this time as operatic scenes. A surreal fictional narrative is intercut with the stories of their struggles against government and the pharmaceutical industry. In this fictional world, Gertrude Stein decides to write a tragic opera about Tim and Zackie and their saint-like heroism. She kidnaps them, transports them to Niagara Falls, and forces them to sing a series of complicated avant-garde vocal compositions. However, when Zackie ends his treatment strike and starts taking his pills, Gertrude realizes that there will be no more tragedy, and thus, no more opera.

1962年、ボルチモア。ぽっちゃり体型だが前向きな16歳の女子高校生トレーシーは人気TV番組「コーニー・コリンズ・ショー」の憧れのキャスト、リンクと踊る日を夢見る。そんな時トレーシーは母エドナの反対を押し切って番組のオーディションに参加して一度は落選するが番組を司会するコリンズの目に留まり、レギュラー出演者の座を獲得。やがてトレーシーには黒人の友人が増えるが、番組が黒人を差別していると気付く。