David Cote

David Cote is a librettist, playwright, and theater critic based in New York City. His current projects include an opera with Scott Davenport Richards about the life and activism of Paul Robeson; a chamber opera with Laura Kaminsky about music therapy and memory; and a one-act with Stefan Weisman for mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn about Greenland’s melting ice sheet. Previous work includes Blind Injustice (Cincinnati Opera), Three Way (Nashville Opera, BAM) and The Scarlet Ibis (Prototype).

David will revise the libretto of a multimedia opera, Meltdown, in which a glaciologist’s lecture on ice loss morphs into a personal and scientific experience of grief and resolve. The work will be composed by Stefan Weisman for mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn. He will also begin a new period drama about the 150-year popularity of a bowdlerized “happy ending” King Lear, and a heroic London actress who fights to restore the original.