Jeff Lockwood's son, in a single instant, suffered 13 fractures and a traumatic brain injury. The impact was so severe, Lockwood told Wyoming Public Media, that it ruptured the atrium of his heart. What followed was six months of surgeries, hospitals, and the particular kind of waiting that only the families of the seriously injured know.
His son recovered. Lockwood, a professor emeritus of natural sciences and humanities at the University of Wyoming, needed somewhere to put the experience. He found it in opera.
"Hurting, Healing, Hoping: A Trio of Medical Operas" will have its world premiere Friday and Saturday, Oct. 23 and 24, at 7 p.m. at the Gryphon Theatre, inside the Laramie Plains Civic Center at 710 E. Garfield St. The program consists of three 20-minute operas, with librettos by Lockwood and music by Michael Udow, a composer and former member of the Santa Fe Opera. Three singers from the Rocky Mountain region perform, backed by a chamber orchestra drawn from classical musicians in the area. Projected text will accompany the performance to help audiences follow the words. Tickets are $20, and all proceeds from ticket sales go to the Laramie Downtown Clinic.
For Lockwood, the choice of opera was not a flourish. It was a conclusion reached over a long career spent writing about science and the natural world.
"I have found that in my career the power of the written word often connects us with our cognitive abilities, our thinking, our analytic," he said. "That's why we debate. That's why we make arguments and write essays and letters to the editor. But music touches our hearts, and when you can put together the arts -- and of course opera includes all of the arts, visual arts, theatrical arts, performing arts, literary arts -- they're all there. But when you can tap into both the human mind and the human heart, then you've got the capacity to tell very powerful stories."
This is not Lockwood's first turn as a librettist, and the earlier one is a story in itself. In 2014 he began work on "Locust: The Opera," a one-hour piece for three singers about the Rocky Mountain locust, the swarming grasshopper that brought famine to farms across the western United States before vanishing with mysterious suddenness at the dawn of the 20th century. Lockwood had already written a 2004 book on the extinction, "Locust," but the subject, as he put it to Science News, "begged in my mind for the grandeur of opera." The composer was Anne Guzzo, who teaches music theory and composition at the University of Wyoming. The breakthrough came when Lockwood imagined a spectral soprano locust, borrowed from the ghost of Hamlet's father in "Amleto," haunting a scientist until he worked out what had killed her kind. To conjure a swarm, Guzzo's music theory class experimented with snapping fingers, rattling cardstock and crinkling cellophane before settling on the simplest solution.
The new trio turns that same instinct -- that a scientific or medical subject can carry the weight of an opera -- toward the hospital room. The Gryphon's announcement describes the works as crafted "to engage all people, whatever their backgrounds, in exploring together the physical and mental challenges confronted by medical patients and providers." Lockwood has said he wants the operas to shine a light on the medical professionals who helped his son recover, which places the piece in a tradition as old as opera itself: the art form has always been drawn to the bedside, from the mad scene to the deathbed aria. What is newer is the subject matter -- not myth or monarchy but the modern medical industry, seen from the family's side of the waiting room.
Udow, the composer, brings his own long history with the form. Born in Detroit in 1949, he served as principal percussionist with the Santa Fe Opera from 1968 until his retirement after the 2009 season, a tenure of more than four decades in one of the country's most respected opera companies. He has composed orchestral and wind ensemble works, chamber music, film scores and several operas; "Hurting, Healing, Hoping" has been billed as his sixth. He is also the author of "Percussion Pedagogy," published by Oxford University Press, and a member of the Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame. The pairing of a Wyoming entomologist-turned-librettist with a veteran Santa Fe Opera musician is an unlikely one, but the two share a conviction that music can carry ideas the written word cannot.
The premiere is embedded in something larger. On Sept. 15, Laramie Mayor Sharon Cumbie issued a proclamation declaring October 2026 the city's first Health and Healing Arts Month, recognizing the importance of physical and mental health, Laramie's healthcare community, and the role of the sciences, arts and humanities in supporting healthy communities. The proclamation specifically names the opera. "I invite all residents to attend the world premiere of 'Hurting, Healing, Hoping: A Trio of Medical Operas' Oct. 23 and 24 to honor all those who contribute to creating a vibrant community," Cumbie said in the proclamation.
The production is a University of Wyoming undertaking, bringing together UW faculty and others from the university community with regional professional musicians and community partners. The beneficiary, the Laramie Downtown Clinic, has for years provided care to low-income and uninsured residents of Albany County. For its first eight years the clinic operated one night a week out of the Albany County Public Health building downtown, setting up after Public Health closed early on Wednesdays to take walk-ins for non-emergency care. It has since grown into a fixture of the local safety net, and the opera's ticket revenue will go to support its work.
That the proceeds should flow to a clinic for the uninsured is fitting. The operas are, at bottom, about what happens to ordinary people when the body fails and the machinery of medicine takes over -- and about the people who show up to help. Lockwood's son is the origin of the story, but the story belongs to anyone who has sat in a hospital corridor, signed a consent form, or thanked a nurse whose name they never learned.
Performances are at 7 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 23, and Saturday, Oct. 24, at the Gryphon Theatre, 710 E. Garfield St. Tickets are $20, available through the Gryphon and Eventbrite. The operas run about 20 minutes each, and the projected text means no prior acquaintance with opera is required -- which is rather the point. As the Gryphon puts it, these are works meant for all people, whatever their backgrounds.