Neil Balfour will make his US debut next season with Portland Opera as Father/Judge/Reporter/Mastoi in Kamala Sankaram’s Opera Thumbprint, in a production directed by Omer Ben Seadia.
Commissioned for the PROTOTYPE Festival, Thumbprint was inspired by the true story of Mukhtar Mai, a young illiterate peasant who was gang-raped as retribution for an alleged ‘honor’ crime by her little brother and who became the first woman in Pakistan to bring her rapists to justice.