In the heyday of the seventies underground, Bobby DeSoto and Mary Whittaker – passionate, idealistic, and in love – design a series of radical protests against the Vietnam War. When one action goes wrong, the course of their lives is forever changed. The two must erase their past, forge new identities, and never see one another again.

Now it is the 1990s. Mary lives in the suburbs with her fifteen-year-old son, Jason, who spends hours immersed in the music of his mother’s generation. She has no idea where Bobby is, whether he is alive or dead. A few towns away, an aging hippie calling himself Nash presides over an anarchist bookstore, drawing the disaffected youth of the next generation into a shifting series of “groups” and “collectives.” Miranda, alone among the kids who frequent the bookstore, takes Nash seriously.

Shifting between the protests in the 1970s and the consequences of those choices in the 1990s, Eat the Document is an alternative opera that explores the connection between the two eras—their language, technology, music, and activism.