BOSTON — When Margaret Atwood began her novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” with the line “We slept in what had once been the gymnasium,” she may well have been referring to the Lavietes Pavilion here.

After all, the dystopian story abounds with references to Boston and neighboring Cambridge, and suggests a Harvard University — Lavietes, its basketball arena, included — repurposed for the militaristic theocracy of Gilead.

Boston Lyric Opera is running with that possibility. For its new production of the Danish composer Poul Ruders’s unsettling and complex 2000 adaptation of the novel, the company opted for something site-specific. The gym was available, and for the first time the opera will be staged in the city where it takes place.