It’s a long and winding road to the latest Quantum Theater production of Osvaldo Golijov’s Grammy Award-winning chamber opera, Ainadamar. Audience members will enter East Liberty Presbyterian Church’s Highland Avenue entrance and follow the signs along the main floor hallway, then down a circuitous series of staircases into the social hall.
The atmosphere is rather dark and intense, with audience seats in multiple tiers along sides, much like the nave in a cathedral. Will we be judge and jury? A few more platforms in the middle serve as theatrical stage devices.
The company is rehearsing some problem spots in the opera, which means “fountain of tears” in Arabic, the presumed site of premier writer Federico Garcia Lorca’s death. As they begin, there is an equally intense atmosphere generated by the overlapping trio of women’s voices, so rich and immediately compelling.
The expressive words of librettist David Henry Hwang play over three screens scattered around the hall and a full orchestra delves into the Golijov’s layered score, conducted by Andres Cladera. The story, so impressionistic, reveals the relationship between Lorca and his muse, great Catalan tragedian Margarita Xirgu.
The audience will see it all from her perspective, her memories and an all-female cast will cover the roles.
When Cladera heard it about two years ago, the music director “loved it from the get go.” Of course, it is “a very powerful story” to him because Xirgu is a Uruguayan heroine, having established the national theater in his home country. And, as it turns out, the libretto begins in Montevideo, Uruguay.
When he took the CD to director Karla Boos, she had the same reaction. “I put it on, listened to it in the dark and, without understanding one 
word, I decided to do it. I just adored the music — I just conjured up all these images.”
She calls music in general “an emotional language,” and, when a part of an opera, “ultimate theater.”
Certainly the score itself, which emanates from the flamenco, is highly complex, at times wafting around the hall, then having a rhythmic element, then haunting with the soulful textures of the all-female cast. Woven into all of that are echoes of trumpets, the processing of strings through a midi-keyboard and pre-recorded sounds such as water and the galloping of horses.
Cast member Carolina Loyola-Garcia admits that she is a full-time filmmaker, but her longtime involvement with flamenco and with Quantum Theatre (The Red Shoes, Maria de Buenos Aires, Yerma, 36 Views) is sending her down new paths, where she will both sing and act as the statue of Maria Xirgu, the symbol of flamenco and a representation of Lorca’s poetry, plus transform into Fascist military figure Luis Alonso.
She just received a new pair of flamenco shoes from Spain and is nursing her feet with ice packs.
“It’s very challenging,” she modestly says, adding that the complexities in Ainamadar are “like peeling an onion,” but implying that the result will be well worth the effort.
Through Oct. 28. See Listings.
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