SAN FRANCISCO – The Handmaid’s Tale, playing through Oct. 1 at San Francisco Opera’s War Memorial Opera House, is a monumental production, a harrowing cautionary story, and a feat of imagination managed deftly onstage. The piece is huge in size and scope, counterweighted by Chloe Lamford and Helen Hebert’s spare, bleak and industrial set, where cast members push scenery on and off the stage. As usual, the performers are top-notch in this production, which I saw Sept. 17, one of seven performances.

The story goes like this. The post-America theocracy of Gilead has reduced young women to vessels for child-bearing, and along with them, men to sex machines (though we don’t hear much from the men in this opera). The story, after all, is told through a woman’s voice. Because the material is so extreme the text makes for intense high-volume opera: “You are invisible unless penetrated,” Aunt Lydia (soprano Sarah Cambridge) sings, or almost shrieks during a handmaids’ brain-washing session.

The Handmaid’s Tale, rife with believable horror because these atrocities have happened in real life, makes a convincing opera based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 best-selling novel that inspired a film, a ballet, a dragged-out Hulu series, a sequel 2019 Atwood novel The Testaments, and an international wave of women wearing red in protest and resistance.

In many ways, the opera compares to film, toggling back and forth in time from the Before Time (before Gilead, when life was well, like today’s) to the dark world of the Gilead present. And that is the time Offred (mezzo-soprano Irene Roberts) lives in and speaks of, if “in fragments,” as she sings in the Prologue. Roberts is onstage the entire 2-hour-50-minute production with one 20-minute intermission. Her singing, which rises above the atonality of the music, is magnificent if not overwhelmingly tuneful, due to the score. As director John Fulljames wrote in the SFO program notes, “she is an everywoman character whose story, Atwood implies, may be an assembly of many women’s voices.” Offred means Of Fred, the man with whom she is assigned to bear a child. If she doesn’t have a baby, she goes to work in the radiation fields. Offred could mean “offering” or even “offed,” layering the tale on many levels.

This opera takes place in 2030, too close to 2024 for comfort. A revolution has occurred and women’s rights have been taken away. Women can’t work, talk to men, have abortions, divorce, and for young women, their only purpose is to serve as vessels for male sperm. There is no such thing as a sterile man, part of the consistent brainwashing by “the aunts” (women are in charge of mind-changing, and they spend most of their time inculcating the handmaids with Gilead rules and threats). Any atrocity committed, or mistake or misstep made, “the aunts” sing, is a woman’s fault. And certainly a red dress, a handmaid’s uniform, is easily spotted.

Christina Cunningham’s costumes are color-coded with handmaids dressed in bright red dresses stitched with slightly alluring necklines along with blindingly white wimpels for headwear. Brainwashing aunts are in dull military green, infertile wives in virgin blue, and the automaton men strut about in retro police uniforms. Everything is drained to bleak conformity; nuance and gray areas in this dystopian, nightmarish world do not exist.

Slavery, lynchings (yes, you will see human bodies hung), Nazi laws of exclusion, terror and eugenics, euthanasia administered to imperfect “unbabies,” forced sex to induce pregnancies, rape. Atrocities are part of Gilead, and author Atwood says she didn’t make up any of these tortures, including the ban on abortion, which America has recently reinstated. History holds each of these outsized horrors in its dirty hands.

Though you can appreciate Handmaid’s artistry, it is tough to like this opera, unless dystopia is your thing, or unless you relish discomfort. Many times the dark intensity heated up to such a full boil that you wanted to leave the opera house, and many people in the audience did at intermission. Consider the onstage gynecological exam; the hanging of two human women who dangle realistically from ropes on the stage (hanging effigies add to the scenery); Offred’s mechanical sex sessions with the somewhat sympathetic Commander (bass John Rylea) with former gospel-singer/“wife” Serena Joy (mezzo Lindsay Ammann) looking on dispassionately.

In the end, Offred is either arrested by Gilead goons or freed by the resistance, though she sings that she has no way of knowing what her future will bring, The chorus feebly holds up signs at the the edge of the stage that spell IN HOPE. The music is a discordant anti-hymn.The finale is confusing, incoherent and slightly corny — if barely consoling.

The opera is relentlessly agonizing with few moments of grace, but there are some if not enough. An especially beautiful duet between Offred (Roberts and mezzo Simone McIntosh, the pre-revolution Offred) plaintively wonders about Offred’s pre-revolution daughter. But you have to wait for the second act for that. And Robert’s solo about the moon and her menstrual cycle is moving and unusual. Where else would you hear an aria like that? Offred’s encounter with her lover Nick (tenor Brenton Ryan) – a desperate but fortunate set-up by the Commander and Serena Joy because Offred has not yet conceived with the Commander––  accounts for a few minutes of tender relief.

But overall, the opera is hard-edged, unmelodic and misogynistic. Of course, many great operas are misogynistic. To name a few: Porgy and Bess, Don Giovanni, Tosca, Madame Butterfly and Nico Muhly’s searing 21st-century Dark Sisters. So that aspect, as exaggerated as it is in this story, is nothing new to opera.

The music by Danish composer Poul Ruders–whom Atwood said in a SFO interview begged her to let him adapt her book to opera–is jagged and complex, set to 79 instruments, plus tons of percussion that required five musicians. There were 59 choristers, 19 principals, eight dancers, and 22 supernumeraries that included children.

Karen Kamensek, who has been called a “Philip Glass specialist,” though she says she loves her Puccini as well, conducted, and she pared down the clusters of notes to an almost understandable and digestible level for the audience. Called a “conductor to watch” several years ago by The Washington Post’s music critic Anne Midgette, Kamensek was able to manage the opera’s shifting rhythms. Anyone who wins major awards for conducting Philip Glass, as she has, offers a lot in handling and communicating a piece like this. To be fair, the music and libretto by British writer Paul Bentley was scattered with some poignant moments, such as excerpts from “Amazing Grace,” written by John Newton, a slave-trader-turned-abolitionist. The New Testament’s Beatitudes, “blessed are the meek,” “blessed are those who mourn,” etc., that surface now and then like a chant, are lovely and offer a bit of comfort. Keeping the audience on edge is more important than comfort.

The opera premiered in Copenhagen in 2000 at the Royal Danish Theatre and at the Minnesota Opera in the United States in 2003. This San Francisco Opera co-production with the Royal Danish Theatre is the West Coast premiere. It was scheduled to open in 2020, but was postponed due to Covid. The opera is a hard-to-swallow must-see piece for its cautionary tale about women’s rights — and human rights — but be prepared for many uncomfortable moments.