Two bits of information stuck with me as I experienced the closing performance of “Butterfly,” Heartbeat Opera’s chamber adaptation of Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly,” at the Baruch Performing Arts Center, on Sunday afternoon. In a program note, Heartbeat’s young leaders express their desire “to birth productions that tackle urgent questions confronting our society today—questions of otherness, misogyny, cultural appropriation, and crossing borders both literal and metaphysical.” In an interview with the Times, however, the director, Ethan Heard, touched on another important point: “This opera is a masterpiece. We want to honor the beautiful writing and score, but inject some questioning into it, and bring people in closer proximity to it.” The first of these sentiments makes Heartbeat Opera’s production relevant. The second, however, makes it worthwhile.

“Madama Butterfly,” for all its greatness, certainly has problems: the sexist diminution of Cio-Cio-San (the title character, a fifteen-year-old Japanese geisha) and the Orientalist condescension toward Japanese culture coexist with powerful expressions of tenderness, nobility, and, of course, melodic genius of a high order. If these problems eventually become insurmountable, then the best way to “critique” such an opera, of course, will be, simply, not to perform it. Since many of us find such an outcome intolerable, however, productions like Heartbeat’s will provide a necessary counterpoint to full, traditional stagings, like the Met’s, in which the opera’s glories—and its flaws—are brought to the full magnification that the composer intended and that most audiences demand.

Today’s “indie opera” outfits are making do with less money than what even our country’s regional-level companies enjoy, so it’s no surprise that chamber-size realizations are often necessary. But what’s so pleasing about Heartbeat Opera’s “Butterfly” is how well its artistic intentions dovetail with its limited means. (I fully agree with Anthony Tommasini’s positive review of the production, which ran in repertory with a similar adaptation of Bizet’s “Carmen.”) The orchestra is cut down, but to an arrangement (by the composer Daniel Schlosberg) for harp and string quintet that recalls the mellifluous elegance of the original. The cast members—notably, two singers of Asian descent, Banlingyu Ban and Siobahn Sung, in the roles of Cio-Cio-San and her servant, Suzuki—are young but promising enough that you wouldn’t mind hearing them in a grander production and a bigger space. And while the set is little more than a raised platform with yellow banners on the front and sides, it suits the production’s preoccupation with the fluidity of borders.

These liminal zones can be temporal, cultural, or sexual. The marriage broker, Goro, as portrayed by the tenor Jordan Weatherston Pitts, plays feminine when with the women but butch when he’s with Mackenzie Whitney, who takes the role of the macho American sailor, Pinkerton, and Matthew Singer, as Sharpless, the American consul in Nagasaki. (Sharpless wears a Victorian-era suit, but Pinkerton sports modern preppy garb and an iPhone.) For the role of Kate, Pinkerton’s American wife, the Heartbeat production asks for the ultimate suspension of disbelief—she’s an inanimate object, a tall, svelte mannequin with blond hair. Yet the gesture, which could have seemed lazy or cheap, fits in with the basic generosity of the staging: the opera, with its first two acts reordered and shortened, is projected as a dream/nightmare of a young, contemporary Asian-American boy who, with the help of his laptop computer, is questioning his origins.

While Heartbeat Opera was radically reconfiguring Puccini and Bizet, New York City Opera was announcing its 2017-18 season, which, depending on which press piece you read, was either a burst of promise or a sober reckoning with reality. I find the pickings rich: chamber operas by Donizetti, Rameau, Tobias Picker, and Dominick Argento, the American première of Charles Wuorinen’s “Brokeback Mountain,” and, not least, new productions of Montemezzi’s “L’Amore dei Tre Re” and Puccini’s “La Fanciulla del West.” I’ve always loved “Fanciulla,” not only for its lyrical clarity and the shrewd economy of its construction but for its heroine, Minnie, who, unlike poor Cio-Cio-San, is a forceful and independent woman who doesn’t let men get the better of her. But this opera’s Wild West setting has two minor but problematic characters: the Native American roles of Billy Jackrabbit and his “squaw,” Wowkle, each kindly depicted but heavily stereotyped. (Wowkle’s most common line of dialogue is “Ugh!”) The general director Michael Capasso’s embrace of old-fashioned City Opera naturalism can be charming, but in this matter a little revisionism might be in order.