Amy Hutchison / Reviżjonijiet

Chicago Fringe Opera has emerged as the most consistently impressive of the city’s storefront opera companies. The upstart troupe discerningly chooses edgy, contemporary works and pulls them off successfully with thoughtful casting and modest but effective stagings. Such was the case again with Laura Kaminsky’s one-act opera As One, heard Friday night in its Chicago premiere at the Center on Halsted where it runs through Sunday. With a libretto by Mark Campbell and Kimberly Reed, As One examines issues of gender identity, as represented by the title transexual character Hannah–a young man who is cautiously transitioning into his female persona. Hannah’s conflicted nature is represented by two singers: Hannah Before (Jonathan Wilson) and Hannah After (Samantha Attaguile). The concise 75-minute opera moves breezily between vignettes of Hannah’s life and the growing realization that he is really a woman. Among the young Hannah’s early key moments are his wearing a woman’s blouse underneath a shirt at age 12 while delivering papers, and secretly–and humorously–researching the word “transexual” at a library.

Chicago is currently awash in debut operas by major young composers staged by upstart companies. Third Eye Theatre Ensemble is presenting Nico Muhly’s Dark Sisters, which runs through November 6. And Friday night Chicago Fringe Opera gave the Chicago premiere of Missy Mazzoli’s Song from the Uproar at the Preston Bradley Center. Fringe Opera scoring a striking success with their performances of Philip Glass’s In the Penal Colony last spring. Compared to the claustrophobic gallery for that show, the wide fourth-floor space at the Uptown venue must have seemed like the Met. Premiered in 2012 in New York, Song from the Uproar tells of Isabelle Eberhardt, a Swiss journalist and explorer who lived from 1877-1904. Her short but packed life hits a Lotto Powerball of zeitgeist-friendly themes: a feminist pioneer and anti-colonial activist; a convert to Islam; and a woman who cross-dresses to pass as a man in Algeria. Add her debut published story written at 18 about necrophilia and her death in a flash flood at age 27, and the material was clearly impossible to resist for composer Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek.

It’s rare to see an opera with both as much new about it and as much to recommend it as As One, which had its Santa Barbara debut last weekend at the Lobero Theatre.