Yuri Gripas/Reuters

Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, chat before a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee nomination hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, March 28, 2019. They coauthored an op-ed calling climate change real and largely driven by human activities.

On March 8, two members of the U.S. Senate joined in a statement calling for Congress to take action to address global warming. What was unusual is that one of them is a Republican and chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, while the other is the top Democrat on that committee.

“There is no question that climate change is real or that human activities are driving much of it,” said Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., writing together in The Washington Post.

The call to action symbolizes a shift in both rhetoric and substance by conservatives on what’s widely seen as today’s central environmental issue. It’s an issue that Republican politicians in recent years have been more likely to dismiss than embrace.

Increasingly, lawmakers who had called climate change into question or framed it as highly uncertain are bluntly naming it a real problem. And others who had not been so dismissive, like Ms. Murkowski, are ramping up efforts to act on the issue.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., is calling for a “new Manhattan Project” on energy. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., is trying to rally his colleagues to create a Republican plan to contrast with Democrats’ Green New Deal. And in the House, the GOP’s leading voice on a new climate change committee is Rep. Garret Graves, who speaks on the issue with an urgency linked to his experiences in the bayous and wetlands of Louisiana.

This Republican pivot doesn’t mean the two parties will be locking hands in a kumbaya moment over major climate legislation anytime soon, especially when President Donald Trump isn’t joining the chorus. But political analysts say the shift is rooted in political dynamics ​– rising public concern and on-the-ground evidence of a warming climate ​– that are likely to persist.

“When the head of the party [is] opposed to action … that’s an enormous obstacle,” says energy-policy analyst Josh Freed of the think tank Third Way. But “that being said, there are green shoots starting to show, where [Republicans] are starting to acknowledge climate change and they are starting to propose some actions that would be helpful.”

In part, the question to be navigated by both parties is how to curb greenhouse emissions in a way that’s both environmentally meaningful and economically pragmatic.

At one end of the spectrum is the left’s Green New Deal, embraced by some House Democrats and Democratic presidential hopefuls, which aims to be environmentally meaningful by calling for reducing greenhouse gas emissions “as much as technologically feasible.”

Conservatives regularly bash the plan as radical and expensive socialism that would wreck the economy. But pollsters suggest that without a plan of their own, Republicans risk coming across as climate deniers, especially by young voters who increasingly represent a big chunk of the electorate.

A clean-energy push

Some in the party see a chance to win over these and other voters by positioning their party to promote clean-energy innovation while avoiding a command-and-control approach that could burden taxpayers and businesses.

Speaking to reporters in the Capitol building Monday, Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, called innovation “an ultimate solution to climate change” and said “current technologies will not get us to a point where we actually reverse the growth of emissions of greenhouse gases.”

Susan Walsh/AP/File

Protesters gather outside the White House in Washington on June 1, 2017, opposing President Donald Trump's decision to withdraw the Unites States from the Paris climate change accord.

Voters of all stripes tend to endorse clean energy.

“It’s not necessarily even about the climate. What should be driving our energy future is a capitalist free-market approach to embracing the innovation that we’re seeing,” says Tyler Duvelius, a young Republican who heads the Ohio Conservative Energy Forum in Columbus.

About two-thirds of conservative voters in that key swing state said they want 50% or more of Ohio’s electricity to come from renewables, his group found in a poll early this year. “Wind and solar are on parity if not sometimes less expensive than traditional sources of energy,” says Mr. Duvelius, who also touts the benefits of renewables for the nation’s energy independence.

For some Republican politicians, a rising urgency on climate change appears to be personal as well as political.

In the deep-red state of Idaho, 11-term Rep. Mike Simpson cites a “consensus among most policymakers” as a reason to curb greenhouse gas emissions, but he also recently mentioned climate change in the context of efforts to revive populations of salmon that “are the most incredible creatures, I think, that God has created.”

Is the GOP sincere?

Democrats wonder whether the GOP emphasis on promoting innovation is environmentally meaningful or just represents a delaying tactic.  

“I’m not sure I’ve seen enough evidence” of a genuine GOP shift, says Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md. “I think the public’s way ahead of Republican members of the Congress.”

“It’s neither a sufficient set [of lawmakers], nor are their solutions sufficient,” says Mr. Freed at Third Way, which promotes center-left policies in Washington. Yet he says the story could change if more Republicans join the shift, if new technologies get a policy “push” for implementation, and if innovation becomes a gateway toward other actions.

“It’s a start. And the first step to addressing the issue is to acknowledge that there is a problem,” he says.

Technology is one way forward

To Jason Grumet, president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, another Washington think tank, the evolution of Republican positions looks even more promising. After years of Congress being stuck amid inaction and bills that only one party could support, he sees barriers to bipartisan discussion coming down.

“What I think we see now is a focus on the kinds of breakthrough technologies that will enable us to sustain our basic economic success and solve the climate problem,” Mr. Grumet says. “I think ... we’re going to see people become more comfortable and more enamored with those solutions and then start to ask the question ‘Well, what kind of policy is going to be necessary to get these technologies to deploy at scale?’”

He sees early steps, including one bipartisan bill to encourage advanced nuclear power and another for a “Use It Act” nurturing technologies that capture carbon dioxide emissions.

The effort by Senators Murkowski and Manchin “is the kind of conversation that gives me optimism,” adds Mr. Grumet. ”Democracy is a momentum sport.”

For his part, Senator Graham is determined to try to win President Trump’s support for a bill that can be framed as helping both the environment and the economy.

“Let’s just cross the Rubicon,” he said at a late-April event in Texas. “Let’s, as a party, say ... climate change is real” while offering an alternative to the Green New Deal.

From a corner office on the top floor of the University of Washington’s Physics and Astronomy Tower, data scientist Bernease Herman looks out on Seattle’s Portage Bay as it flows toward the city’s high-tech hub and Amazon headquarters.

A former Amazon employee, Ms. Herman decided to join dozens of prominent artificial intelligence (AI) researchers last month in urging Amazon to stop selling a facial recognition technology to law enforcement. She was troubled by a study by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher that found that Amazon Rekognition technology is biased because it is less accurate in identifying women and people of color and risks being misused by police to infringe on civil liberties.

After Amazon disputed the studies, Ms. Herman felt compelled to join other AI researchers in speaking out. Raising concerns about possible risks from AI “is a primary part of all of our roles,” says Ms. Herman, who researches bias in the AI field of machine learning at the UW’s eScience Institute.

“We are the first line of defense,” she says, underscoring AI researchers’ sense of responsibility to weigh AI advances in light of the public good.

Across the Pacific Ocean in China, in contrast, debate over topics such as Chinese security forces’ use of facial recognition technology to target minority groups remains “completely off limits” for AI scientists, says Jeffrey Ding, the lead China researcher at the Center for the Governance of AI at the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. 

That’s not to say there aren’t signs of defiance. In March, for example, China’s overworked software developers made use of GitHub, an encrypted code-sharing platform owned by Microsoft, to demand relief from their grueling work regimen known as “996” – 9 to 9, six days a week. The protest went viral. Dozens of Microsoft employees rallied in support, issuing a petition urging their company to keep the platform open even if it came under pressure from Beijing. (China’s government is reluctant to censor GitHub, however, because of the critical code-sharing service provided by the platform.)

“There is more dissent than we can see on the surface level, and sometimes it bubbles up,” Mr. Ding says. Still, unlike in the United States, in China “there is no robust civil society pushing very strongly on this,” he says.

As the U.S. and China forge ahead as world powerhouses in the development and application of AI, the cautionary voices of researchers – and their choices about collaboration – could hold the key to promoting beneficial cooperation while preventing malicious or dangerous uses of the revolutionary and often unwieldy new technology, AI experts say.

In turn, their ability to discern between constructive and harmful AI sharing could help prevent a widening technological schism between the U.S. and China that, if allowed to grow, could spread globally as nations are forced to decide whether to align with the world’s leading democracy or its most populous authoritarian state.

High-tech battleground

AI collaboration between the two tech leaders is coming under scrutiny in Congress and elsewhere, as Washington and Beijing view one another increasingly as strategic competitors, casting the race for AI as a critical battleground. Both countries enjoy unique strengths. The U.S. leads in research talent, critical hardware, and AI companies. China has accumulated far more of the data needed to fuel AI and seeks to lead the world in AI by 2030.

China’s military buildup and intensifying political repression under President Xi Jinping have increased concern in Washington. “Artificial intelligence as a technology presents enormous economic benefits but also potentially enables military capabilities and ... surveillance,” says Elsa Kania, an expert on Chinese military technology at the Center for a New American Security, a D.C. think tank. “It’s clear there are a number of ethical and security concerns that come into play when we are talking about research collaborations.”

U.S. universities and companies have collaborated, sometimes unknowingly, with Chinese scholars who are actually military officers or affiliated with Chinese military universities. “There is a shockingly small amount of due diligence and oversight,” says Alex Joske, a researcher with the International Cyber Policy Center of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. China has sent approximately 500 military scientists to U.S. universities since 2007, an estimate based on analysis of peer-reviewed publications co-authored by China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) scientists and overseas scientists, Mr. Joske says. 

Last month, reports surfaced that academics at Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing had co-written papers with researchers affiliated with China’s National University of Defense Technology on AI methods that can be used for surveillance. Over two decades, Microsoft Research Asia has trained hundreds of top Chinese IT professionals and academics and graduated 7,000 alumni, many in the field of AI.

While analysts say most research collaboration doesn’t have specialized military applicability, they agree that U.S. researchers should avoid working with PLA scientists.

“Anything involving the Chinese military should be a bright red line,” Ms. Kania says. 

Risks for citizens 

Another area of concern is China’s use of artificial intelligence in surveillance, targeted propaganda, and enhanced censorship. For example, China’s nearly ubiquitous WeChat app last year began using an AI technology called optical character recognition to filter and delete images containing sensitive words, stifling a method that Chinese netizens used to evade censorship.

Thomas Peter/Reuters

A screen shows a demonstration of facial recognition software at the stall of artificial intelligence company Horizon Robotics at the Security China 2018 exhibition in Beijing Oct. 24, 2018.

“Without artificial intelligence, you need a big army of human censors to identify and delete,” says Sarah Cook, a senior research analyst for East Asia at Freedom House, an independent watchdog organization that promotes democracy. “This is a way to refine censorship and cut off ways netizens have been able to circumvent censorship of keywords, and this is much cheaper, too.” 

Given AI’s potential for military, surveillance, and censorship use, “U.S. companies and researchers need to be having uncomfortable conversations internally: What is the nature of the technology and the field? How do we have these conversations without cutting off collaboration?” says Samm Sacks, an expert on communication technology policy in China at New America, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington.

Indeed, Ms. Sacks and other AI experts note that amid concerns over malicious AI uses, many examples of benign and positive AI cooperation are overlooked. 

“What doesn’t get reported are AI researchers in the U.S. and China working on collaborative projects that are beneficial to society, for example on the health care front,” says Baobao Zhang, a research affiliate at the Center for the Governance of AI and a doctoral candidate in political science at Yale University. One joint project used AI to help diagnose illness in children, including toddlers, according to a study published this year. 

Food security is another area of fruitful AI cooperation. For example, Microsoft, Intel, and the Chinese tech giant Tencent last year took part in a cucumber-growing contest, exploring how AI could raise greenhouse productivity and advance indoor farming.

Oversight – and a welcome mat

As U.S. policymakers look for tools to prevent the leakage of sensitive AI know-how, they face unique challenges in efforts to regulate this and other related emerging technologies.

Congress has called for the modernization of U.S. export controls that originated during the Cold War and the strengthening of oversight of technology transfer to China. Yet this is challenging due to the two countries’ deep economic connections and the transnational and commercial nature of most AI research and innovation. Given this “technological entanglement,” Ms. Kania says that blunt tools that risk cutting the two-way flow of expertise are counterproductive. “Applying export controls to algorithms is antithetical.”

More effective tools to prevent unwanted AI transfer include improving cybersecurity protections, using expanded foreign investment rules to block risky foreign acquisitions of critical technology, and taking legal action against technology theft. Universities, moreover, should enforce regulations on foreign nationals conducting research in sensitive areas, AI experts recommend.

But stark responses, such as denying U.S. visas to Chinese scholars and researchers, are likely to backfire, they warn, especially given that by some measures more than half of the U.S. top talent pool in AI is made up of foreign nationals. “News about Chinese students and researchers whose visas are denied has a chilling effect on the U.S. ability to draw top AI talent,” says Ms. Zhang.

Instead, the U.S. should leverage its strengths by boosting investments in AI research while expanding innovation and openness as well as diversity and inclusion. This includes taking steps to ensure talent from China stays in the U.S. by welcoming students and scholars and pushing back against organizations such as Beijing-backed student associations that experts say surveil and coerce Chinese academics in the U.S. Indeed, the overworked Chinese tech workers who turned to GitHub to evade China’s censorship “firewall” would clearly appreciate both more freedom of expression and fewer working hours.

“At a time when China is becoming more repressive under Xi Jinping, there is an opportunity for welcoming Chinese students, scientists, and entrepreneurs who don’t feel they can pursue research or build companies with as much freedom,” says Ms. Kania. “It’s a tragedy for China but can be framed as an opportunity for the U.S. to welcome some of the more free-thinking entrepreneurs.”

Working on machine-learning models at her UW office tower, Ms. Herman emphasizes that broad discretion in research and knowledge of who the end users will be lie at the heart of protecting U.S. AI technology and preventing misuse.

She points to a recent example: When the San Francisco nonprofit OpenAI developed an AI system capable of writing articles on any subject based upon a brief prompt, it broke with its usual practice of releasing the full model so as not to unleash a capability that could flood the internet with fake news.

“It’s certainly something that academics think about a lot – what’s the use of their technology,” says Ms. Herman. “It’s a pretty painstaking decision process.” 

When Esperanza Escribano complained on Twitter about harassment by a garbage truck driver in Barcelona, she got a reply from the local administration within minutes, asking her about the street and time of the incident and assuring her it wouldn’t happen again.

“Something changed on a symbolic level, but that in itself is really important. When I got the message, I felt much safer,” says Ms. Escribano, a journalist living in Barcelona.

In the past four years, the local government of Barcelona, led by Mayor Ada Colau, has put forward a strategy for the “feminization of politics” that tries to “incorporate the gender perspective in every area of politics and society,” as the city council website describes it. That has meant visible changes in how the city portrays gender roles, responds to sexual harassment and violence, and supports its female population. And Barcelona’s changes have been at the forefront of a deeper shift happening below the surface across Spain.

But the feminist movement in Barcelona has its critics too, and not just in “traditionalist” ranks like the ultranationalist Vox party, which entered the national parliament for the first time ever in Spain’s general election on April 28 in part on a reactionary anti-feminist platform. Some who consider themselves feminists say that the movement in Spain goes too far with symbolic gestures and reforms for the privileged and needs to do more to accommodate freedom of expression and facilitate more profound changes.

Juan Soto Ivars, an author, believes that when it comes to debating feminism, Spain is facing a “cultural war” where “there is no middle ground.” But he warns that some of the elements of the feminist movement may be fueling the response of groups like Vox.

“Women have to deal with issues men don’t have to deal with. That’s why I am a feminist,” he says. “But I am against the type of feminism that seeks to censor classic children’s books or to silence comedians or opinion writers. I am against anything that curbs freedom of expression.”

Urban planning with gender perspective

The city of Barcelona is known for its feminist history, going back to the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), when female Republicans fought alongside men on the battlefield. Despite dictator Francisco Franco’s strong repression of Catalonia after the Nationalists’ victory, women in the region began organizing and formed alliances, which paved the way for a full-blown Catalan feminist movement, one of the strongest in Europe at the time Franco died in 1975. The feminist movement in Barcelona has remained strong ever since.

Ana Prata, an expert in feminism and social movements at California State University, Northridge, believes the institutionalization of feminism in Barcelona should also be attributed to Catalonia’s demands for increased autonomy and a clearer sense of identity, which accelerated in the last few years and is closely related to the independence movement.

Emilio Morenatti/AP/File

Ada Colau raises her baton after having been elected mayor in Barcelona, Spain, in June 2015.

“The city of Barcelona in particular, and Catalonia in general, are interested in showcasing their own specific identity, experiences, and ways of organizing themselves,” says Dr. Prata.

When Ms. Colau was sworn into office in 2015, all members of her newly appointed government declared themselves feminists, a first in Spain. And the city government’s focus on feminization is visible today.

Billboards marking St. George’s Day, on April 23, no longer display the patron saint of Catalonia protecting the princess from the dragon. A school in Barcelona recently decided to remove the legend of St. George from the school library’s shelves along with 200 other children’s books that the school considers sexist and toxic, such as “Sleeping Beauty” and “Little Red Riding Hood.”

In Barcelona, nightclub bouncers have been trained to identify sexual harassment and act on it. Most bars in the city display information about how to proceed in case of gender violence, assuring women that they can and should complain.

Across the city, public illumination was improved in most neighborhoods to increase safety, and every new project of urban planning takes gender perspective and the role of women as caretakers into consideration. The improvements on public transportation were implemented with mobility issues in mind, which, according to the Barcelona City Council, affect women more than men.

Furthermore, the local government created a department to deal with the child and elder care economy. And all the companies that work with the city council are obliged to implement a plan for gender equality that includes adopting a protocol against sexual harassment and inclusive communication that fights against sexist communication.

Marta Cruells, a feminist political scientist and head of the cabinet of the Feminism and LGBTI Department of the Barcelona City Council, says that the feminist local government of Barcelona wasn’t afraid of “putting emotions and affects at the center of politics, opting for a way of doing politics which is traditionally linked to a more female way of being in the world.”

A Spanish issue

Barcelona’s feminist shift comes as Spain’s reputation as a sexist country is changing. A poll published by the Spanish online magazine CTXT last November showed 58% of women and 46% of men in Spain identify as feminists.

The trigger that brought the feminist dynamic to the surface, experts say, was the not guilty verdict against five men charged with gang rape of an 18-year-old woman during the running of the bulls festival in Pamplona. A national outcry followed both the 2016 attack and the 2018 verdict that found them guilty only of a lesser offense of sexual abuse against the teenager. Protests and a serious debate around women’s rights and an institutional culture of misogyny in Spanish society ensued.

The April 28 election was focused to a great extent on feminism. The center-left Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party (PSOE), which led the previous government in which women headed 11 of the 17 ministries, won about 29% of the vote behind a pro-women platform. The PSOE’s long-time rival, the conservative Popular Party, took almost 17%, halving its seats in parliament. Its leader had toyed with rolling back Spain’s 2010 legalization of abortion to allow terminations only in cases of rape, a risk to the mother’s health, and fetal deformities.

Vox, meanwhile, won 10% of the vote on a vociferously anti-feminist line. Since entering the Spanish political scene, Vox has denounced what it calls “gender jihadism,” called on protests against “supremacist feminism,” and asked for the reopening of the abortion debate. A recent poll found 44% of Spaniards believe the current gender violence legislation can be harmful to men. The far-right party has claimed without evidence that 87% of gender-violence accusations have been dropped, suggesting they were false accusations. Spanish government data indicates that only 0.01% of accusations are false.

‘Feminism lacks a solid organization’

Mr. Ivars, the author, argues that censorship is fueling the far-right in Spain, since some men are turning to Vox to express their resentment. “Mainstream politicians in Spain are afraid to be called sexists, which means some issues have become a taboo. Everyone knows the gender violence legislation leads to a lot of false accusations, but only Vox talks about it. Some men, even left-wing voters, have had enough of that censorship and are turning to Vox,” he says.

Victor Lenore, a journalist who identifies with the left, says that many feminists focused too much on surface gestures rather than real change. “If you change all the children’s books, women’s lives won’t improve. They’re focusing on symbolic things instead of concentrating on improving the workplace or demanding more free time to be with family and friends,” he says.

Mr. Lenore also believes the anti-feminist backlash Spain is now experiencing could have been avoided. “We saw the backlash coming because it’s happening in other countries, but we were not smart enough to understand big demonstrations don’t mean the far-right will be stopped,” he says. “Feminism is very popular in Spain right now, but its roots aren’t so deep. It’s explosive, but it lacks a solid organization. A lot of people show up for the demonstrations, but not as many show up for the day-to-day work.”

Some women living in Barcelona seem to agree with Mr. Lenore. Not all are happy about the feminist efforts of the local government, but for some it’s because they don’t believe the transformation went as far as it should have.

Daniela Ortiz is a mixed-race Peruvian artist who has been living in Barcelona for 11 years. She credits the gender parity regulations put in place by Mayor Colau’s government for invitations to take part in cultural events in the city. But she believes feminism in Barcelona is falling short of the opportunity to transform the patriarchal system.

“White feminists reduce all gender violence to the violence practiced by men and completely ignore institutionalized racist violence, which is also a symptom of the patriarchal structure they criticize,” Ms. Ortiz says, drawing on her own experience of dealing with Spain’s bureaucracy to get a residence permit for her son born in Barcelona. “These women focus mostly on breastfeeding rights and polyamory and are totally oblivious to the racism immigrants experience in public institutions.”

To mount an adaptation of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the Boston Lyric Opera took a page out of the original novel. Specifically the first page. The opera company is staging its May production in the very same gym described in the opening scene of Margaret Atwood’s feminist story, which unfolds in a dystopian version of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The meta setting is part inspiration, part necessity, as the 42-year-old opera company no longer has a permanent home. In 2015, the group and its longtime host, Boston’s Shubert Theatre, disagreed on the terms of a contract renegotiation.

The BLO saw the dislodgement as an opportunity. Over the past four years, it has staged productions in various venues across the city and its satellite neighborhoods. Not just inside theaters, but also at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, a synagogue, and an ice-skating rink. The BLO’s pop-up installations have empowered it to find more creative ways to present shows, shrug off fusty traditions associated with opera, and diversify its audience. It could be a model for others to emulate.

Jingnan Peng/The Christian Science Monitor

Caroline Worra as Aunt Lydia at a rehearsal of the Boston Lyric Opera's ‘The Handmaid's Tale’ on May 1, 2019.

“It allows us to bring opera to neighborhoods, not expect everyone to come to us, but actually take us to other places in other areas,” says Esther Nelson, general and artistic director of the BLO. “Much of where we put opera today is sort of locked into a European legacy, and that can be a handicap because it then no longer allows the art form to expand beyond what the venue offers.”

“The Handmaid’s Tale” is the company’s largest-scale production to date.  

Over 72 hours, 200 workers transformed Harvard University’s Lavietes Pavilion into the set, a detention center that will be familiar to readers of the book or the popular TV series on Hulu. Forbidding brick walls bookend both ends of the stage, which includes a courtyard lined with utilitarian benches. Fluorescent lights embedded on top of the bricks amplify the harsh effect. (See time-lapse video, below.)

“There are video projections on the walls and the walls actually help with the acoustics as well,” explains Bradley Vernatter, acting production director for the show, surveying the set from the bleachers at a recent dress rehearsal. “The goal is always to weave acoustic decision-making into as much of the design as possible,” he says.

The set’s palette is a relentless gray, designed to showcase the vivid color contrast of the female characters’ iconic red-hooded capes. Props include barbed-wire gates mounted on wheels, along with beds, tables, and a gallows pole as tall as one of the gym’s basketball hoops.

In advance of opening night on May 5, when Ms. Atwood herself is expected to attend, the pressure is on to get every detail right. The production director roams the stands with a sound gun to measure sound levels. For most of the year, the gymnasium is filled with basketballs thudding off backboards, sneakers squeaking on parquet, and the grunts of tall athletes. But at the dress rehearsal, it is the trilling vibrato of sopranos that washes over the bleachers. The seats are covered in drapes to replicate the impact that the audience of 1,500 will have on the acoustics. Sound baffles mounted above the 65-piece orchestra help reflect the tremor of kettle drums and murmuration of strings into the stands. The singers are unamplified. Yet their voices are so powerful that one half expects a crescendo of high C notes to threaten the structural integrity of the glass ceiling.

“The ceiling creates acoustic issues,” says Mr. Vernatter. “Also, it creates design issues because in a theater you would have a dark space, but a lighting designer can control every element of light that you’re experiencing. We have matinees. We have evening shows. The quality of the light will be different based on the time of day.”

He occasionally glances at a hand-held thermometer to keep an eye on the temperature. The air conditioning units had to be turned off because they were too noisy. Mr. Vernatter even asked Harvard to unplug the Jumbotron hovering above the court because it emitted an ambient hum.

Those sorts of hiccups are minor compared to the larger logistical challenges for BLO productions. For starters, they have to find rehearsal spaces for hundreds of people. The BLO plans its productions three years in advance, says Ms. Nelson, so it’s difficult to book venues so far ahead. Yet she feels the advantages outweigh the hassles. No longer reliant on other theaters’ booking systems, the BLO can now see who its attendees are – and forge a direct marketing and fundraising connection with them.

“It’s very clear now with our audience that we have a much younger profile,” says Ms. Nelson. “Depending on what neighborhood we are in, it reflects the neighborhood more, who’s present.”

She adds that their more traditional repertoire, such as “The Barber of Seville,” won’t necessarily have crossover appeal. But productions such as “The Handmaid’s Tale” – based on Poul Ruders’ contemporary score and featuring a libretto by “Game of Thrones” actor Paul Bentley – demonstrate that opera doesn’t necessarily mean a formal dress code, let alone lyrics in a foreign language.

As for the future, the BLO aspires to build a permanent space that can better accommodate its forward planning and offers sufficient seats to meet demand. But even if it finds a permanent home, it will continue pop-up installations.

“We have a pretty good idea of what attracts audiences and what you want to be for the audience for the future,” says Ms. Nelson. “And so it actually allows us to be ahead rather than be burdened by a legacy from the past.”

“The Handmaid’s Tale” will be performed May 5, 8, 10, and 12.

Editors note: This story has been updated to correct the wording of one of Bradley Vernatter's quotes and his title. 

Reuters

Katarina Barley, Germany's Justice Minister and a candidate for the European Parliament elections, poses with 15-year-old pupil Joshua Kezo-Masibu from Congo in Aachen, Germany, May 2.

In late May, voters in the 28-nation European Union will elect a new parliament for a continent with more than 500 million people. The last election in 2014 was a bit ho-hum and saw a low turnout. But that was before more than 1.3 million Arab and African migrants crossed the Mediterranean into Europe from 2015 to 2016, igniting political panic.

Now EU chieftains are worried that rising anti-immigrant sentiment – tinged by fear and hate – will give an election boost to right-wing populist parties and give them a strong voice in the 751-seat parliament.

The coming elections are not the only concern of EU leaders as they search for ways to quell feelings against migrants. On May 1, neo-Nazi groups marched in Germany and Sweden. And last Sunday, an anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim party entered Spain’s parliament for the first time since the fall of the Franco regime in 1975. The Vox party won 10% of the ballots.

Its rise comes after similar parties in France, Denmark, and Germany also saw electoral surges. In nine countries, far-right parties now either rule or share power in a coalition. While these groups reflect other issues such as anti-EU nationalism, they generally play on the fear of immigrants.

So far, the EU has yet to come up with an effective response to deal with either the refugee crisis or its aftereffect, the populist hate against migrants. The solution, however, may not be continental in scope. Rather it could be local, starting with proven programs that replace hate with inclusion, tolerance, and respect.

In March, top European officials met to explore ways to deal with the rise of neo-Nazi movements, the most virulent expression of anti-immigrant feelings. They focused on a successful program in the Swedish city of Kungälv, which has discovered a clever way to curb the recruitment of neo-Nazis. It is now being promoted as the “Kungälv model.”

After neo-Nazis in the city killed a 14-year-old in 1995, Kungälv began to study the rise of such groups and discovered many young people join racist gangs even before they are teenagers. Rather than deal with boys in the groups, the city started a project to teach tolerance to young girls who hung out with them. The training included visits to Holocaust sites in Poland.

“We reasoned that if the girls stopped supporting them, they wouldn’t have people around them,” one Kungälv official told The Guardian. The project, according to a study by Birmingham University, has led to “an increased sense of security, less vulnerability, and most important of all, less hatred.” Sweden has expanded the program across the country.

While still small in scale compared with the bigger problem in Europe, the project at least points to the need to change one heart at a time. The EU election will be a bellwether on the popularity of anti-immigrant parties. But the answer to them lies elsewhere.