THE title character of Lucia di Lammermoor is a woman whose brother deceives her into believing her true love, Edgardo, has abandoned her, and then forces her to marry another man. When Edgardo returns and accuses Lucia of betrayal, she goes mad, kills her husband and imagines being married to Edgardo.

   It’s not your typical love story, but Lisette Oropesa, the soprano who’s playing Lucia in Opera New Jersey’s production of Gaetano Donizetti’s 1835 opera, says real emotions can fuel the story and help an audience relate to Lucia’s pain despite the opera’s over-the-top plot.

   ”Those moments, those little moments in life that we cherish and remember, in operas they make them nice and long,” she says with a laugh during an interview at the Woolworth Music Building on the Princeton University campus. “So in a way it’s a chance to hit the pause button, if you will, on life and bask in those moments.”

   Lucia di Lammermoor will be performed at McCarter Theatre July 10, 18 and 26. Opera New Jersey’s summer season will also include Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado July 12, 17 and 25, and Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio July 11, 16, 19 and 24. Lucia di Lammermoor and The Mikado will be performed on the Matthews Stage, marking Opera New Jersey’s debut in McCarter’s bigger venue.

   Born and raised in Louisiana, Ms. Oropesa received a degree in vocal performance from Louisiana State University, then was accepted into a young artists program at the Metropolitan Opera, where she watched famous sopranos like Natalie Dessay, Diana Damrau and Anna Netrebko in rehearsals and performances.

   ”You go and you just sit and watch and learn and absorb,” Ms. Oropesa says. “An opportunity like that is invaluable.”

   She has since performed on stage at the Met, including singing Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro in her major role debut there. (She’ll take on the part again at the Met in the fall.) As for Lucia, she’s been preparing the part for two years, and is performing it for the first time with Opera New Jersey with an eye on singing it regularly.

   Lucia’s most famous aria is the “mad scene” in Act 3, a 20-minute vocal challenge. But Ms. Oropesa says the rest of the opera can’t be done half baked in order to save up for the mad scene.

   ”The mad scene is the culmination of a sequence of events, the events that lead up to it have to mean something or else the mad scene makes no sense,” she says.

   Playing Edgardo is Westminster Choir College grad Jonathan Boyd, who’s also performing in Lucia di Lammermoor for the first time. “It’s a little scary and at the same time extremely invigorating,” Mr. Boyd says of taking on a new role. One thing he’s working on is singing the opera’s “antique Italian.”

   ”Even some of my Italian friends are saying, ‘I have to look up some of these words,’” he says. “Because they’re not used anymore. It’s almost like speaking Shakespeare but in Italian.”

   Something else Mr. Boyd enjoys is discovering how to combine singing and acting. “I think they now really go hand in hand,” he says. “You offer what you can do physically while still being able to sing. And that’s what the rehearsal process is about.”

   For example, in rehearsal he may experiment with running before attempting to sing a certain note. Figuring out what can and can’t be done is something he’s working on with director John Hoomes.

   ”He is a person who really likes to try things that are not in the box,” Mr. Boyd says of the director. “He gives you such motivation to explore what you’re going to do. He’ll give you an idea and you run with it a little bit, and from that he’ll say, ‘I see what you did here. Can you give more of this idea, can you give me less of this?’ Though he hardly ever says ‘less,’ he’s not a less is more kind of guy.”

   Mr. Boyd lives in Manhattan and grew up in Corning, N.Y. His parents must have taken a liking to the Princeton area while their son attended Westminster, because they relocated here after retiring, making it convenient to see their son sing Edgardo.

   After his work with New Jersey Opera, he’ll play Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni at Cleveland Opera, then he’ll head to Paris to play Tom Rakewell in The Rake’s Progress. His plans for 2010 include Romeo and Juliet in Columbus, Ohio, with his wife, Malinda Haslett.

   Performing opera around the world means having little time at home (Mr. Boyd says he spent 94 days in his Manhattan home in 2008), but it has its up sides, like when he performed The Magic Flute in a theater in Malta that was built two years after Mozart’s death.

   ”They had refurbished it to its original state, and I realized I was singing in a theater that was just as old as Mozart,” he says.

   It’s not all tragic love in Opera New Jersey’s season. In addition to Mozart’s comedic The Abduction from the Seraglio (which is the opera that the Emperor in Amadeus says has “too many notes”), the company is also presenting Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado with its story filled with politics, religion, sexual persecution and beheading.

   ”That’s all at the heart of ‘The Mikado’ and yet it’s done in such a way that you walk out laughing and feeling great,” says director Michael Scarola (who helmed Opera New Jersey’s La Cenerentola last year). “It’s an interesting dichotomy that it’s this incredibly serious subject completely covered up by the brilliant lyrics of Gilbert and the brilliant music of Sullivan.”

   Despite its Japanese setting, The Mikado was a thinly disguised statement on British politics at the time. (The opera debuted in 1885, when Japanese culture was all the rage in Britain.)

   ”One of the wonderful things that is very much a tradition of this piece, is that there are certain musical numbers that are open to updating,” Mr. Scarola says. This includes a song sung by Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner, in which he lists people the world could do without. Mr. Scarola won’t share any of the modern names in the list but says they should draw laughter.

   ”This is the tradition of the piece,” he says. “It was always meant that as this piece moved into different eras, the topical subjects of the day were to be adjusted to make sense to a modern audience.”

   Most of the cast members have performed their roles multiple times. Curt Olds, for example, is singing Ko-Ko for the 15th time.

   ”I would be foolish, and I think any director is foolish, not to take advantage of the talent that the singer brings into a rehearsal room,” Mr. Scarola says. “Me telling Curt how to play Ko-Ko is a complete waste of time. What Curt and I have done is sat down and talked about some of the things he loves doing when he plays Ko-Ko. And then I’ve thrown a lot of ideas around I have about how to play it. So we’re finding that mid-ground as it were, where we’re taking all of his knowledge of the role, plus some of my ideas and melding them all into a character that fits into this production.”

   Working with cast members who know the parts (and whose singing and comic timing is “perfect” according to Mr. Scarola) allows the director to deeply explore the work.

   ”I think my style of directing (Gilbert and Sullivan’s works) takes the traditions and skews them, just a little bit, to kind of play it somewhat more in a music theater style,” he says. “These pieces were always meant as music theater pieces at the time, but I think now we have a different concept of music theater.”

   The Mikado’s comedic nature doesn’t mean it’s any less challenging for the performers, according to Mr. Scarola. “There’s a lot of serious singing in the piece, and you need legitimate opera singers to sing this well.”

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  Opera New Jersey will perform Lucia Di Lammermoor at McCarter Theatre, 91 University Place, Princeton, July 10, 18, 8 p.m., July 26, 2 p.m. The Mikado: July 12, 2 p.m., July 17, 25, 8 p.m. Tickets cost $15-$110. The Abduction From the Seraglio will be performed July 11, 24, 8 p.m., July 16, 7:30 p.m., July 19, 2 p.m. Tickets cost $59-$90; 609-285-2787; www.opera-nj.org