Before she found her career as a sought-after (and award-winning) writer, the playwright Sarah Gancher was working as an education coordinator for The Metropolitan Opera in New York City. Part of her job was to lead student groups to see operas like “Eugene Onegin,” by the Russian great Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
Its first two acts are set in the Russian countryside, which reminded her of Arkansas. Gancher is a California native, but her grandparents had lived in Fort Smith, and she was familiar with the undulating hills of the Ozarks.
She told herself it would be fun to write a bluegrass adaption of “Eugene Onegin,” and she filed that idea away. She wasn’t a playwright then, and she wasn’t really a bluegrass player or songwriter then, either. Instead, she was working towards a career as a director and also focusing on classical music…