War is usually told through stories of heroism and horror, but it’s also a grind, and the same can be said about opera. Tobin Stokes and Heather Raffo’s Fallujah is not a faux-filmic spectacle with blood packs and recorded explosions. It tells a story about the consequences of an ordinary act of war, about ordinary soldiers and ordinary residents of the city those soldiers were ordered to attack.
It is an opera about the terror of numbness, and the fear that behind the numbness is something worse than pain.