Minnesota Opera is staging the American premiere of Poul Ruders’ “A Handmaid’s Tale (based on the Margaret Atwood book). Company officials have already cast “The Handmaid’s Tale” as a “financial bath. They couldn’t attract a corporate sponsor, and while the opera comes from a popular book, it’s not from a beloved one. ‘Maybe it was just a backlash of the times, with the war and all, but make no mistake, we created something extremely volatile and controversial. You have illicit sex, perversion, betrayal, hope and love and such heartbreaking loss. But if audiences are going to be trapped for three hours, you have to grab and entertain them, and this does that quite well’.”