Painting becomes theater and theater becomes painting in these four works by Aliza Nisenbaum at the Met Opera. Revealed is the iridescence of the surface that is opera—the color, artifice, pageantry, and gestural drama—while also foregrounding, via conscious construction, the designers, make-up artists, directors, and stagecraft labor that goes into opera as “total art form.” Engaging the language of opera, along with its complex production, Nisenbaum conducted behind-the-scenes research in the Met archive, immersed in photographs, costumes, wigs, the workings of stage design and set machinery, and in conversation with four different Divas preparing for one of the most difficult roles in opera: that of “Violetta,” the archetypal nineteenth-century ‘fallen woman,’ in Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata.