Laura Kaminsky’s ‘Time To Act’, which opens at Pittsburgh Opera this weekend, focuses on a group of high-school students who have experienced that all-too-familiar American trauma of a school campus shooting.
The librettist and director Crystal Manich (pictured) herself finished high-school herself completed high-school weeks after the April 1999 massacre at Colorado’s Columbine High School, where two 12th-graders shot and killed 13 other students and a teacher.
She says: ‘I think what we really pride ourselves on in this piece is putting young people at the center of the conversation about what needs to change. It’s so much more than just about laws that are in place. It’s actually about what is happening in our social psyche in the United States. We resort to violence at any given turn.’
