By Cory-LaNeave Jones

March 27, 2026

There are evenings when the past does not feel past at all, when it arrives not as history but as breath—ragged, urgent, and unwilling to be filed away. Gilgamesh: The Opera, premiering March 28 and 29 at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, is one of those evenings. It does not simply revive the oldest surviving work of literature; it interrogates why we have needed it for so long, and why, perhaps, we still do.

Presented by the Assyrian Arts Institute in partnership with Lyric Opera of Orange County and Bridge to Everywhere, this world premiere is less a staging than a reckoning. It asks: what does it mean to inherit a story older than empire, older than spoken language, and to sing it now, here, in Southern California? A globally vital economic engine that has not yet fallen into the Pacific, perhaps like the lost Atlantis. A place where histories converge, fracture, and begin again.

The answer, in part, lies in the music of Derrick Skye, whose score does not behave. It refuses the clean borders of Western classical tradition, instead folding in rhythmic and tonal languages from across continents—West African polyrhythms, Middle Eastern modalities, traces of Hindustani tala—until the orchestra itself feels like a site of migration, not a migraine. You do not listen to it so much as fell yourself move through it, as if the sound were a landscape and you once were it’s temporary inhabitant.

And then there is the text, the libretto by Diana Farrell, who also directs the production with a clarity that feels almost unsparing. Farrell has described the opera as a meditation on legacy versus immortality, but in performance the distinction feels less philosophical than bodily. Immortality is the clenched fist, the refusal to yield; legacy is the open hand, the act of release. Watching this Gilgamesh, you will begin to suspect that the oldest written story we have is also one of the most contemporary: a study in grief, in friendship, in the unbearable knowledge that to love is to lose.

Parts of this ancient narrative include some pretty dastardly elements of past cultural activities and mega-male-chauvinist egos that, if were written today, may be the target of a New York Post hit piece to “Me Too” it’s original author. In the Stephen Mitchell translation, Gilgamesh continually repeated the phrase: “I will make a lasting name for myself. I will stamp my fame on men’s minds forever.”

The narrative does remain familiar in its bones. Gilgamesh, the king of the great-walled Uruk —two-thirds god, one-third man—rules with arrogance until the gods send Enkidu, his equal and opposite, to humble him. Their clash becomes communion; their friendship becomes, wait for it, legendary. Together they defy “the gods,” slay the Bull of Heaven, and in doing so, invite catastrophe. Enkidu parts from the soil from which he as created. Gilgamesh, undone, sets out in search of his unrequited goal of immortality and finds instead the limits of his own flesh and blood.

In Mesopotamia, towns would build a wall or multiple walls to encircle a city, as protection from outsiders. These cities would have a temple constructed to honor the city’s main god and some cities would have additional temples for other gods. These temples, called Ziggurats, were  similar to step-pyramids but were constructed up with earth and mud-brick in the shape geometricians call a frustum, basically a pyramid with the top chopped off. On top of this platform would be the temple area for rituals and creation of religion and City-state indoctrination.

But what distinguishes this production is not the arc—it is the texture. The wedding scene, for instance, in which Gilgamesh asserts his dominion by claiming a bride, unfolds with a ritualistic intensity that feels both ancient and uncomfortably current. Here, San Diego–based performers Ahmad Joudeh as Young Gilgamesh and the duo of Ailie Fleming and Gian Carlo as the Bride and Groom bring a local gravity to this immemorial myth. Joudeh’s physicality—at once tensile and volatile—renders Gilgamesh not as a distant hero but as a young man intoxicated by his own power, a body still learning the consequences of its force. Fleming and Carlo, meanwhile, embody the fragile human cost of that power: their presence is brief, but it lingers, a quiet indictment woven into spectacle.

There is something distinctly Southern Californian about this convergence—artists from San Diego inhabiting an Assyrian epic, performed in Cerritos, shaped by Los Angeles–based collaborators. It is not a flattening of cultures but an acknowledgment of their entanglement. In this sense, Gilgamesh: The Opera feels less like an adaptation and more like a continuation, a new tablet added to an ancient archive.

The production’s visual and choreographic language, guided by Stephen Martin Allen, leans into this idea of continuity. Movement here is not decorative; it is narrative, sometimes even argument. Bodies bend, collide, and spiral in patterns that echo the score’s layered rhythms. The result is a stage picture that rarely settles. Even in stillness, there is a sense of something shifting beneath the surface, as though the past itself were restless.

Conductor Fatima Corona leads the ensemble with a sensitivity that allows these complexities to breathe. Under her direction, the orchestra does not overwhelm the voices but converses with them, sometimes gently, sometimes with a force that feels almost geological. It is a delicate balance, and one that the production maintains with remarkable assurance.

And then there is the question of voice—who gets to tell this story, and how. The involvement of Assyrian scholars and artists, including ethnomusicological guidance from Dr. Eve Sada, research affiliate in Spirituality and the Arts at the Harvard Divinity School, grounds the production in a cultural specificity that resists the easy universalism often imposed on ancient texts. This Gilgamesh does not claim to belong to everyone equally; it acknowledges its origins even as it reaches outward.

Perhaps this is what gives the opera its quiet urgency. In an era defined by displacement—of people, of histories, of identities—Gilgamesh becomes less a relic than a mirror. It reflects a world in which survival itself can feel like an act of defiance, where the preservation of culture is both a burden and a gift. As Diana Farrell has suggested, legacy is not about outlasting time but about what we leave for others. This production has a verisimilitude in translating this core through-line of the text.

It is tempting, in writing about a work like this, to lean into the language of grandeur—the epic scale, the mythic stakes. And certainly, those elements are present. But what lingers, what refuses to dissipate even after the final note, is something quieter: the image of a man, stripped of his illusions, confronting the inevitability of loss. Managing the grief and the chaos of living. It is an image that feels as old as humanity and as immediate as tomorrow.

For San Diego audiences willing to make the short journey north, the reward is not just a night at the opera, but an encounter—with history, with culture, with the persistent question of what it means to be human. Gilgamesh: The Opera does not offer easy answers. It does something more difficult, and perhaps more necessary: it asks us to listen, across time, to a voice that has never gone entirely silent.

And in this listening, there is a touch of inheritance.

Gilgamesh, The Opera is being performed Saturday March 28 at 8:00 PM and Sunday March 29 at 4:00 PM at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts located at 18000 Park Plaza Drive, Cerritos, CA 90703 – just a hop skip and a jump off the 91, just off of the 5, just past Anaheim.