A piercing look at intolerance and mass hysteria in the digital age.

At a Glance
- Based on the film by Atom Egoyan
- Music by Armenian-American composer Mary Kouyoumdjian
- The 16th collaboration between LA Opera and Beth Morrison Projects

Hate is too often portrayed as binary. We either hate or we don’t. We hate someone for something they did or some perceived slight, or we hate “the other.” Yet we are not born with hate—it is learned, nurtured, and developed over the course of a lifetime.

An adaptation of Atom Egoyan’s 2008 film of the same name, Adoration follows Simon, an orphaned high school student. As part of a dramatic writing exercise, Simon’s teacher encourages him to appropriate details from a harrowing news event as something perpetrated by his parents. When his story goes viral, Simon uses the hysteria within his community and on the internet to highlight the challenges of intolerance and racism in our society. The fictional and actual circumstances of the loss of Simon’s family are revealed in fragments, only fitting together with the final revelation that the prejudices of Simon’s maternal grandfather led to his parents’ deaths.

Adoration tells two simultaneous stories—a fictional story of terrorism and betrayal juxtaposed with a real story of family strife and rejection of something foreign.

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