Coda: Less of a Theater Audience Available to Purchase

Looking to Toshi Reagon’s science fiction opera, Parable of the Sower, based on the Octavia Butler book by the same name, this chapter explores escape as a narrative of entanglement. In Reagon’s work, the reader, the listener, and the theater audience are asked to become part of the retelling of the episodic stories of escape in necessarily sonic and spoken repetitions. Reagon’s opera shows a version of escape that demands togetherness, uncomfortable coalition, and the destruction of the figure of the human as the only method of survival.