ORSON REHEARSED

Orson Welles' heart has just stopped.

We enter his mind in this moment, on the threshold between life and death.

In the bardo Orson’s thoughts unspool as a stream of consciousness that loops back on itself, like a Möbius strip. Three avatars onstage in the theater of his mind are paired with three oneiric films within the film as he shuffles through his memories, loves, regrets, like a magician preparing for one last trick.

Is he ready for what comes next?

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9/10: LOVE BEFORE THE FALL

The myths of Orpheus and Charon are interwoven with the entirely sung story of four friends dining in an Italian bistro who are fated to perish the next morning in the attack on the Twin Towers.

At meal’s end, through magical realism, the restaurant’s mysterious strolling violinist is revealed to be Charon, hand extended, awaiting payment.

Complying, each reconciles with death, and departs to the sounds of the next morning’s busy signals and the calls of first responders.

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I HEAR AMERICA SINGING

A documentary film crew dogs Broadway composer Robbie Doerfler’s final days as he and his friends Roger and Rose prepare for a critical backers’ audition. Robbie’s world unravels as he compulsively recontextualizes musical and narrative tropes to make sense of his life.

Blending operatic and filmic conventions, music history, fantasy, and documentary, the operafilm explores themes of creativity, identity, and mortality, culminating in a poignant and thought-provoking question: “Where do we go when we go up — is it Heaven?”

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The Bardo Trilogy explores operafilm, a new audiovisual genre in which auteur director-composer-writer-editor Daron Hagen’s consistent application of aesthetic, practical, and technical correlatives between music drama, film, and their performance practices create and sustain a coherent aesthetic world in which every element manifests that world. Look for Hagen’s book Exploring Operafilm: Making the Bardo Trilogy, in April 2026 from McFarland and Company.

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