Blessed be the fruit! In her novel The Handmaid’s Tale, published in 1985, Margaret Atwood envisioned an American theocracy she called Gilead, where birth rates are plummeting and women capable of bearing children are raped and enslaved to produce them. Across vast swathes of the United States, that’s not so far from our post-Dobbs reality. Never has Atwood’s implicit warning seemed so timely. Same goes for the opera by Poul Ruders to Paul Bentley’s cunningly crafted libretto. As a musical citizen of the world, Ruders had the forethought to compose it in Bentley’s original English. But the premiere, in Copenhagen, was sung in Danish. That production is the source of the only available recording, which may in part account for the work’s glacial progress on the international scene. Layering hymns on narcotic minimalism in scenes of bristling suspense, Ruders has wrought a masterpiece that deserves a worldwide audience, all the more now that its message is so urgent. San Francisco’s revival is not the first in this country, but the company’s national visibility should put The Handmaid’s Tale on the opera lover’s map as never before. Irene Roberts stars as Offred, the sex slave assigned to the childless household of the Commander (John Relyea) and his Serena Joy (Lindsay Ammann). Sarah Cambidge wields the cattle prod as Aunt Lydia, the male-supremacist Christian Taliban’s willing tool. May the Lord open. —Matthew Gurewitsch

The Handmaid’s Tale streams live on September 20 at seven-thirty P.M. P.T., and is on-demand from September 23 at ten A.M. P.T. through September 25 at ten A.M. P.T. Livestream tickets go on sale July 31.