Country Convenience is an experimental opera for one performer and three musicians set entirely during a graveyard shift at a rural gas station. A middle-aged woman stands alone at the register of a small roadside store — the last outpost for miles — and over the course of a single night, her inner life erupts into song.
Part absurdist comedy, part political elegy, the piece traces the distance between what we were promised … and what we got: a country that runs on oil, on convenience, on the labor of people it doesn’t count. Through original songs performed with mandolin, upright bass, and violin, the work moves from delight to devastation — exploring all the extraction points between.
Country Convenience is a work-in-progress of a new, experimental and deeply American opera about depletion and exploitation — of resources, of ambition, of the earth itself — and the stubborn, exhausted, still-burning inner life of one queer woman inside it.