Seldom does a political drama continue to resonate with the same intensity decades after the circumstances that inspired it occur.

That’s the genius of Gian Carlo Menotti’s 1950 opera “The Consul,” which a group of Kansas University students will stage next weekend.

“It’s very timeless, which is amazing because at the time that it was first performed, people believed the subject matter wouldn’t apply anymore because it was kind of at the peak of McCarthyism,” says Julie Maykowski, the Colorado Springs, Colo., doctoral student in voice who’s directing the production.

“It still applies to this day. … It works in any time in any situation.”

The post-9/11 world of Patriot Act paranoia is no exception.

Menotti set the Pulitzer Prize-winning opera in a nameless authoritarian state where Magda Sorel (Katherin Steinbacher), wife of John Sorel (Evan Grosshans), a radical political fugitive from the state police, seeks political asylum for her family. During her many visits to the office of the consul (assumed to be the United States), we see dozens of other desperate souls trapped in the same sea of bureaucratic red tape.

When “The Consul” was first performed, Congress had taken steps to keep people deemed political subversives out of the country, which helped set the stage for Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s House Committee on Un-American Activities.

Though connections between then and now are obvious, Maykowski does not intend for the performances to make a bold political statement.

“I suppose honestly you could look through the history of war and find circumstances and other writings and essays that kind of affirm the same exact idea: this huge powerful machine that rolls along that is this political bureaucratic system that rolls over people in its path,” she says.

Actors in a Kansas University production of Gian Carlo Menotti's opera The

The production is the first at KU in a long time, if not ever, to have both a student stage director and musical director.

Bryan Lemke, a Des Moines, Iowa, graduate student in accompanying with a vocal emphasis, will play piano behind the vocalists through the 250-page score.

The music, he says, “is very dark. There’s a lot of dissonance but not to the point that you lose a sense of melody.”

Menotti, an Italian composer who trained at the Milan Conservatory and is still alive, has worked and lived largely in the United States. He is known to value theatricality above music, which he sees as a means to a dramatic end.

It’s that particular quality that draws Lemke to the opera.

“Through the telling of Magda’s story, you kind of get the sense that if this could happen to her, it could happen to me,” he says. “Not necessarily these same circumstances but that feeling that there’s things in your life that you just can do nothing about and which are causing your life to go into such a tailspin.”