Created with Ksenia Ravvina and directed by Mr. Huffman, who also wrote the libretto, “Denis & Katya” is an immersion in this awful ambiguity; the new piece is as memorably tense and stark as “4.48 Psychosis,” Mr. Venables and Mr. Huffman’s brutal operatic study of mental illness. On a bare playing space surrounded on three sides by a low bench, with a cellist at each of the four corners of the stage, “Denis & Katya,” seen Sunday evening, uses two singers (Siena Licht Miller and Theo Hoffman) to weave together the accounts of six people near the tragic situation: a friend of the couple’s, one of their teachers, a neighbor, a journalist, a fellow student, a medic.

Each of these characters has a distinct relationship between speech and singing, Russian and English. The teacher’s melancholy, conversational lines, for example, are sung by both singers simultaneously, in English, while the neighbor’s strident music is sung by Ms. Miller in Russian, with Mr. Hoffman’s spoken English translation following behind, like a comet’s trail. The cello quartet sometimes produces an unsteady drone, sometimes spare counterpoint, sometimes strands of folk song .

Then there are spoken, unaccompanied passages in which Ms. Miller and Mr. Hoffman describe, plainly, the Periscope footage created by the young couple. Projected on a back wall are the transcripts of messaging chats, seemingly between Mr. Venables and Mr. Huffman, discussing the ethics of aspects of the opera, like whether they need permission from the 17-year-old friend’s parents to quote him, and whether the staging should include the video Denis and Katya made.

The result of all these elements is an uneasily poignant reflection on storytelling, on the possibilities and limitations of our understanding — especially across space and language in the fragmentary era of social media.