The Bienen School of Music will produce the Chicago area’s first fully staged production of composer Jake Heggie’s opera Dead Man Walking. Performances are February 20, 22, 26, and 28 in Northwestern’s Cahn Auditorium.
A story of redemption, the opera focuses on the interactions between Sister Helen Prejean and convicted murderer Joseph De Rocher, a death-row inmate in a Louisiana penitentiary. Sister Helen becomes De Rocher’s spiritual adviser and helps him come to terms with his violent past.
“For me personally, it’s the realization of a dream,” says Ehrman, who had pursued the rights to Dead Man Walking for a decade. “I’d heard the opera but hadn’t seen it until last spring. I was blown away. I think it’s a great piece, and I’ve wanted to do it for so long. It takes a controversial subject, a relevant subject, and puts it out there for audiences to think about. New York City, San Francisco, all the major cities have had an opportunity to see the opera, and I wanted to bring it to a Chicago audience.”Dead Man Walking continues director of opera Michael Ehrman’s emphasis on staging regional premieres of contemporary American operas. Two years ago he directed the Chicago-area premiere of Ricky Ian Gordon’s The Grapes of Wrath.
Based on Sister Helen’s 1993 memoir, adapted as a film in 1995, the opera’s libretto is by Tony Award–winning playwright Terrence McNally. Heggie began composing the score in June 1997, drawn to the story’s immediacy and relevance. The work was premiered by the San Francisco Opera in October 2000, and seven American opera companies (New York City Opera, Opera Pacific, Cincinnati Opera, Austin Lyric, Michigan Opera Theater, Pittsburgh Opera, and Baltimore Opera) commissioned a second production that was seen at those companies between 2002 and 2006. The opera has since been performed across the United States and Europe.
The piece received a standing ovation at its New York premiere, and San Francisco Chronicle critic Joshua Kosman wrote that the opera was “a masterpiece—a gripping, enormously skillful marriage of words and music.”
“Dead Man Walking is a story of our time, but it has a sense of timelessness to it,” Heggie explains. “It is a distinctly American story, but it has universal resonance. The drama is such that it makes sense for people to sing, and it is large enough to fill an opera house, yet it is incredibly intimate. It is a story that takes us deep into the most difficult struggles we can experience as human beings. It takes us to places that only get intensified with music.”
The opera incorporates many different styles of music, from classical and spirituals to rock and jazz. The variety of music makes it accessible to a wide audience and helps build an emotional connection with the opera’s themes.
For Sister Helen, the addition of music amplified the experiences she wrote about in her memoir and stirred an even greater emotional response to the story. “The composition of the music fits exactly with the drama of what’s happening on stage,” she says. “It has the sound and harshness of prison with the metal clanging of bars, and the tenderness and softness of love and forgiveness. Music and drama reach places of the human heart that people don’t even know they have. [They have] the power to take us to deep places in a way that logical argument can never do.”“For my part, I was clear that my musical language would not be overly complex,” says Heggie. “My compositional voice is based primarily on direct emotional portraits of characters. I wanted to create clear melodic and rhythmic motifs to propel a constantly moving tide of emotion with lyricism without alienating the characters or the audience.”
More than 40 professional opera houses worldwide have produced Dead Man Walking since its premiere.Within the last few years Heggie has agreed to allow university stagings of the piece. Northwestern joins three other universities in securing the rights to perform the opera.
The Bienen School cast will consist of students and one alumna, Joelle Lamarre (G04). In addition to the two main characters, it includes 12 principal players and a 40-member chorus, prepared by chorus master Donald Nally, director of choral activities. Ehrman says that at the auditions last September, he looked for “individuals who are dramatically and musically intense, and who have the maturity to handle emotionally demanding roles.”
Students will share the two lead roles. Quinn Middleman, a first-year master’s student of W. Stephen Smith, and Kelsey Park, a second-year master’s student of Theresa Brancaccio, will alternate playing Sister Helen. Smith students Ethan Simpson (second-year master’s) and Alan York (first-year master’s) will play De Rocher.
The leads spoke of the challenges of their roles and what drew them to the complex characters. Both Middleman and Park mentioned the responsibility that comes with portraying a living person.
“Most opera parts are made-up characters in a larger-than-life plot that occurred in a bygone time period,” Middleman explains. “Dead Man Walking is real. It’s happening now. Sister Helen is still a living, breathing person, and to think about portraying her onstage is daunting and exciting.”
Through these characters, the performers put a face on capital punishment and challenge the audience to think about justice, forgiveness, and the death penalty. As the drama unfolds, the gray area between right and wrong intensifies. For Simpson and York, the challenge is to build a connection between their character and the audience. “It is impossible for most people to truly feel what it is like to have committed Joseph’s crimes and to be condemned to die,” says York. “Yet the fact that he is a human being is the point of the whole drama. I have to find and accentuate the humanness of Joseph.”
“Our goal is to tell the story honestly and without any preaching—to go with Sister Helen on her journey to that difficult place and to let people make up their own minds,” says Heggie.
“When the journey begins, neither we, nor she, are aware of what incredible bravery and power there is inside her when she is tested,” he adds. “But I think it puts all of us to the test. How much could I take? How far could I go? How strong am I? What are my convictions?”