E-Mail This Article to a Friend Grace notes Roger Rudenstein writes the first AIDS opera BY RICHARD BUELL

Roger Rudenstein’s Grace, which opens a five-performance run in its world-premiere production next Friday night at the Cambridge YMCA in Central Square, appears to be the first opera about AIDS. It’s based on the 1988 play by John Carmichael and Edward Langlois that’s set in the Manhattan of the 1980s, which was still reeling in shock, anger, and fear over a plague about which very little was known and not much was being done. But do plagues, once they’ve settled in to stay, achieve a sort of domestication through neglect, denial, and people looking the other way? The muted, doom-ridden sensuality you find in the writings of Arthur Schnitzler and Frank Wedekind a century ago suggest that with syphilis, at least, this could be the case. What Grace seems to be proposing — as antidote — is that we all take a good hard look at the 1980s. Through an opera glass if necessary.

Roger Rudenstein, the New Hampshire–based composer who’s taken Grace on, counts as something of a mystery man. You won’t find a trace of him among the innumerable academic music departments, conservatories, composers’ consortiums, and established new-music ensembles of this region. Symphony Space in New York does know him, however, and the occasional factoid Googles way to the surface. Previous Rudenstein enterprises, one learns, have included James Joyce’s Ulysses, a composite Marlowe/Goethe Faust, and a life of Jesus of Nazareth updated to the present day.

Long faces and unremitting gravitas are not what the Carmichael/Langlois play were all about, and they’re not what Rudenstein’s Grace is likely to be about either. Exhibit A is the presence in the story line of Madame Du Barry (1743-’93), the mistress of Louis XV and patroness of the arts whom Robespierre sent to the guillotine. Lewis, who is dying of AIDS, hits it off nicely with her when she appears to him in his Manhattan hospital room. Wherever she comes from, she proves a welcome respite from a difficult family, a troublesome ex, and the medical staff. "Beautiful music, sumptuous costumes, and innovative design," the publicity material chirrups. Possibly we needed reminding that this sort of thing was part of the 1980s, too.

Just how well will Grace’s mixing of 18th-century France and late-20th-century America come off? The producers have given themselves a definite leg up by enlisting the services of singers and instrumentalists from Emmanuel Music — that is, artists who keep themselves in trim by performing 18th-century music (mostly Bach’s) week after week at Emmanuel Church Sunday services. Among the principals will be tenor Ryan Turner as Lewis, soprano Karyl Ryczek as Madame Du Barry, and baritone Donald Wilkinson as the Duc Du Croy.

Adding yet another time dimension to Grace will be the rather funky venue, the YMCA’s newly restored Durrell Hall (1897), which I’m happy to say still has a whiff of the original 19th-century lecture-circuit "athenæum" clinging to it. (Molly Ivins spoke there recently.) Eventually, athenæums and lectures-as-entertainment disappeared, and it was converted into "The Durrell," a 600-seat neighborhood movie theater remembered by only a very few locals well on in years. Then it disappeared. Now it’s back.

Finally, there’s that title. The play took its inspiration from the scene in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot when Madame Du Barry’s last moments are described to Prince Myshkin. Is there grace for her? Is there grace for us? We were surely meant to ask.

Grace is presented June 18 at 8 p.m., June 20 at 2 p.m., and June 22, 24, and 26 at 8 p.m. at the Cambridge YMCA’s Durrell Hall, 820 Massachusetts Avenue in Central Square. Tickets are $35 ($50 including the opening-night 7 p.m. AIDS benefit reception); call (617) 661-9622, or visit www.ticketweb.com, or drop in at the YMCA’s front desk.