Scarpia's Kiss begins at the 1946 reopening of La Scala when Miranda Baltazar and Samuel Krandall, the star singers, fall in love on stage. Concealing their affair from his family, she seeks seclusion for her pregnancy on an isolated Caribbean island, where her aunt is midwife to a Mayan village without phones or electricity. Over the pregnancy's course the lovers pursue separate paths, communicating by letter, examining the past and imagining a future in the light of new love. The romance is knocked askew by the arrival of a charming Swiss adventurer researching Mayan culture. Scarpia's Kiss is life-affirming, light¬hearted, often comic. Though fully cogni¬zant of the soul's dark corners, it celebrates courage, wisdom and possibility.
