On Monday evening, Amy Poehler climbed a swirling staircase into an elegant, if temporary, haunted house.
“I have said out loud quite a few times that I wish I had more ghostly visits,” she said. “I feel like tonight will fulfill my ghost quota.”
Poehler was among the audience members at the Metropolitan Opera House for the world premiere of “Lincoln in the Bardo,” an adaptation of the 2017 novel by George Saunders. The opera is set in the graveyard where 11-year-old Willie Lincoln, son of Abraham, is laid to rest.
The cemetery is anything but sleepy. Willie gets to know a cast of antsy phantoms that grapple with denial, thoughts of vengeance and reflections on how they might have lived better. (For example: “Rather than poison your husband, resolve to endure him.”)
It was difficult to walk even a few steps without bumping into one of the novel’s famous fans.
The pop star Dua Lipa praised Saunders’s blend of humor and pathos while her husband, the actor Callum Turner, discreetly snapped photos of her with an iPhone. “I love the worlds that he builds,” she said of Saunders. Some moments are absurd, but in others, she said, the author “completely breaks your heart.”
Farther up the staircase, the actor and director Maggie Gyllenhaal called the novel “one of my favorite books I’ve read in the past decade.” It is known for an experimental structure that mixes historical accounts with the fictional musings of dozens of apparitions. Gyllenhaal said she was curious to see how it would translate to the stage.
Operagoers posed for pictures in sequined evening gowns, silk top hats and skeleton-print dress shirts. There were emissaries from New York City’s many creative sectors, including the actress Kate Walsh, the playwright Michael R. Jackson, the comedian Julio Torres and the jazz singer Cécile McLorin Salvant.
Before the curtain rose, 250 attendees gathered on the opera house’s grand tier for a gala to celebrate the production. The night brought in more than $700,000, a welcome total after the collapse of a multimillion-dollar deal between the Metropolitan Opera and the Saudi Arabian government.
The musician Dev Hynes joined Lipa at a table that was crowded with plates of pear tarts and striped bass. Across from them was the comedian Bowen Yang, who plays a hard-drinking, cabaret-loving version of Mary Todd Lincoln in the Broadway play “Oh, Mary!” just 20 blocks south of Lincoln Center.
“This is certainly the diametric opposite tone,” Yang said.
Nearby, Saunders chatted with the librettist Royce Vavrek and Missy Mazzoli, a composer who was commissioned by the Met to write an opera about, well, anything. “Lincoln in the Bardo” was a natural choice, Mazzoli said.
“Even the most normal opera is very surreal,” she said. “I think that ghost stories — things that tap into an eternal sense of time, life and death, really work well on the operatic stage.” While working on the opera, she said, she thought often of her father, who died two years ago.
Ushers began striking their chimes, urging audience members to take their seats. The curtain lifted to reveal a stage that had been transformed into a cemetery, thick with fog.
In the opera’s first act, the spirits admit that they are not quite sure whether they are able to communicate with the living. Offstage, though, Saunders believes that ghosts appear every so often to get a message across.
“I saw one,” Saunders said. “My grandfather’s ghost, when I was 10 years old.”
Three days after his grandfather died, Saunders said, he received a clear message from him that everything was OK and he did not need to worry. “I believe in it because that’s the only time I’ve ever seen anything like that,” he continued. “You get one a lifetime, maybe.”
Other guests pointed out that haunting can take many forms.
“No real ghosts for me,” the comedian Matt Rogers said, “but I’ve run into some ex-boyfriends.”
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