In 1991, with A Thousand Acres, the novelist Jane Smiley brought King Lear to the Great Plains, collecting the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the following year. The opera, premiering this summer, is by Kristin Kuster, set to a libretto by Mark Campbell, an invaluable master of his esoteric craft. Roger Honeywell sings Larry, a farmer bent on dividing his thousand acres among his three daughters. Elise Quagliata and Sara Gartland are Ginny and Rose, who fall in with his plan. Grace Kahl is the Cordelia figure Caroline, who makes trouble. As the family disintegrates, repressed histories emerge that stray far from Shakespeare. Add-on events under the umbrella Acres Unearthed explore themes of family, patriarchy, the passing of the land from generation to generation. There’s even a concurrent King Lear courtesy of the Iowa Stage Company. —Matthew Gurewitsch