Passion Plays | A Festival at Dupont Underground

IN Series, the Washington, D.C. based opera company known for bold, artist-driven opera theater will present PASSION PLAYS, a three-week festival of new musical theater works presented in Washington D.C’s Dupont Underground and Baltimore, MD’s Baltimore Theater Project, with performances in March and April 2026. The festival brings together three single-act productions inspired by the Passion and accompanying sacred music tradition, exploring suffering, loss, and hope in contemporary life. Only the Air (by playwrights Joshua Borths and Shana Oshiro, directed by Timothy Nelson) reimagines Bach’s St. Matthew Passion with newly spoken text alongside the oratorios famed arias, performed at Dupont Underground (March 6-8). Passio, collaboratively created by Lucie de Saint Vincent and Maribeth Diggle, weaves stories of sacrifice and resilience, where tapestries of voices—survivors, pioneers, and creators—are illuminated through jazz, Baroque strings, South Asian percussion, fortepiano, and song at Dupont Underground, March 13-15. For Women Serving Time, an opera-theater work by composer Adrienne Torf and librettist Fatemeh Keshavarz, confronts female incarceration in America through a fusion of Fauré’s Requiem, jazz, and Brechtian theater. This final work will be performed at Dupont Underground in Washington, DC (March 20-22) and in Baltimore at Baltimore Theater Project (April 10-12.) While inspired by the sacred music style, PASSION PLAYS is not framed as religious doctrine. Instead, it offers a secular, human-centered lens on enduring questions: how people endure loss, how communities process grief, and how hope can emerge from suffering. All three works will incorporate minimal staging and a shared visual language to center the body, the text, and the music.