Grand Passions, Real Issues

A towering black grid of square and rectangular cubicles looms at the back of a rehearsal hall stage. It is meant to represent both physical and psychological space--prison cells as much as the interior of the mind--and its very size suggests the insurmountability of the human conflicts unfolding in its shadow.

On stage in front of the massive structure, a group of men and women sing a scene fraught with pain and discord. Sister Helen Prejean, portrayed by mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, confronts the parents of teenagers murdered by the death row inmate she has been counseling.

“We know who you are, Sister. Your efforts to save Mr. De Rocher have made you a familiar face on the evening news,” sings baritone Robert Orth as Owen Hart.

“Only human compassion can save Joe,” sings the sister. “I’m there to comfort him.”

“Comfort him?” replies Hart. “How come you never sought to comfort us?”

The mothers and fathers seem to be reaching out to Sister Helen even as they revile her. In resonant tones that give emotional form to grief, they let the memories spill forth, recalling a casual reprimand or an offhand goodbye to a son or daughter--last words that can never be taken back or changed. “Fix your blouse.” “Comb your hair.” “Do your homework.” “Clean your room.” “Shut the door.” “Take your key.”

It is a moment of extremes, and themes of life and death, love and hate form the core of the drama. The poignant lyricism gives shape to a tale as agonizing as the music is beautiful. The contrasts are nothing less than operatic.

Based on the 1993 book by the real Prejean, which chronicled her ministry to death row inmates, Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally’s “Dead Man Walking” premieres Saturday at San Francisco Opera, directed by Joe Mantello, conducted by Patrick Summers and starring Graham, newcomer John Packard as the convicted killer Joe De Rocher, and Frederica von Stade as his mother, Mrs. Patrick De Rocher. The set is by Michael Yeargan, costumes by Sam Fleming and lighting by Jennifer Tipton.

Yet high as the emotional stakes are for the characters of “Dead Man Walking,” there is drama offstage as well. As with any new opera, it is a risky endeavor, and the attention of the opera world will be fixed on San Francisco this week. Commissioned by San Francisco Opera, it is the fourth and final installment of general director Lotfi Mansouri’s Pacific Visions program for the creation of new American operas. “Dead Man Walking” is also slated to be produced by Orange County’s Opera Pacific in the 2001-02 season and conducted by John DeMain.

In fact, there may be more of a gamble than usual here. Unlike other recently premiered operas adapted from literary classics--including San Francisco’s own “A Streetcar Named Desire,” Lyric Opera of Chicago’s “A View From the Bridge” or the Metropolitan Opera’s “The Great Gatsby”--”Dead Man Walking” is set apart by its topicality, its real world base. It harbors the potential for controversy in much the way John Adams’ “The Death of Klinghoffer” did some years back. Co-commissioned by San Francisco Opera, among other companies, and given its West Coast premiere there in 1992, that piece, which grappled ambiguously with the story of the Palestinian terrorist attack on the cruise ship Achille Lauro, is thought to have encountered resistance from other opera houses because of their fear of political, or at least box office, backlash.

Still, San Francisco Opera claims never to have hesitated. “There was no doubt in my mind,” insists Mansouri, whose Pacific Visions initiative has also been responsible for Conrad Susa and Philip Littell’s “The Dangerous Liaisons” in 1994, a revised version of Stewart Wallace and Michael Korie’s “Harvey Milk” in 1996, and Andre Previn and Littell’s “Streetcar” in 1998. “Opera can deal with the most topical of topics. Americans are finally finding confidence in their own voice. These American pieces now are written for the audience, not for academia. They are becoming a part of the American expression in the art form, rather than based on European models.”

What’s more, the creators of “Dead Man Walking” have not backed off from telling their tale with a directness that some may find unsettling. Indeed, the opera opens with a prologue that includes nudity and simulated sex, followed by a brutal rape and double murder.

And yet, they say, their work is above all a tale of redemption. “What first attracted me to it as a subject was not where you stand on the death penalty,” says acclaimed playwright and librettist McNally, whose idea it was to turn “Dead Man Walking” into an opera. “It’s about the boundaries of forgiveness. It also impinges on how you feel about the death penalty, but we didn’t think of it ever as an issues opera.

“This is about redemption, forgiveness, fighting for your soul,” he continues. “This opera, from the minute it begins, I’m not surprised people are singing. It seems so right because the subject matter almost requires it.”

“The stakes are whether [De Rocher] will be able to admit what he’s done,” adds Heggie, who is best known as a composer of art songs championed by such noted singers as Von Stade, Jennifer Larmore, Renee Fleming and Carol Vaness, and who was recently commissioned to create a new work for 2003 by Houston Grand Opera. “It’s about the level a person has to be able to get to to find forgiveness. I felt there is so much that’s unsaid in a journey like that, that musical time could develop a character and the emotional journey, and it would carry people along.”

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Prejean’s Pulitzer-nominated book, subtitled “An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States,” may be best known to the American public thanks to writer-director Tim Robbins’ 1995 film version, which starred Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn.

The nonfiction tome’s journey to becoming an opera began when Mansouri first approached both McNally and Heggie, separately, about other projects. Initially, Mansouri had wanted McNally to write the libretto for “A Streetcar Named Desire,” but the writer demurred. “I didn’t see anything for me to do but edit the play,” says McNally. “Also, I didn’t know what music could add to that.” However, Mansouri did not give up on the idea of having the multiple-Tony-winning McNally--who penned the book for the musicals “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” “Ragtime” and “The Full Monty,” and is widely known for his interest in opera--write what would be his first libretto for an opera.

Meanwhile, Heggie, who got his start as a partner in a two-piano team with his late wife, Johana Harris, moved from L.A. to San Francisco in 1993. He had suffered a repetitive stress injury in one hand and was uncertain about his musical future, so he took a job at San Francisco Opera, figuring it would provide him with a way to be close to, if not part of, the world of music. “I was in the PR department and the writer for the company, working very full time and writing [music] whenever I possibly could,” he recalls.

He was also working with some of the world’s premiere opera singers, including Von Stade, who was in the then-upcoming “Dangerous Liaisons.” “I gave her some songs as a gift,” says Heggie. “She became this champion and, because of her, other singers started paying attention.” Commissioned songs followed, many of which can now be heard on Heggie’s 1999 BMG Classics/RCA Red Seal CD, “The Faces of Love.”

“Well, little did I know that Lotfi was paying attention to all of this,” says Heggie.

In late 1995, Mansouri approached Heggie. “One day at a party he says to me, ‘Have you ever thought about writing an opera?’ ” recalls Heggie. “I really thought he was making cocktail chat. And the next day, my phone rang and his assistant said, ‘Lotfi would like to see you in his office.’ So I went with my pad, prepared to write the next speech or press release, and he said ‘We have a space in the 2000-2001 season and I’d like you to think about subjects. And I’d like to send you to New York to meet Terrence McNally.’ Well, you could’ve knocked me over with a feather.”

At that point, Mansouri was looking for a comedy. Heggie came up with an idea based on Rene Clair’s 1952 film “Les Belles de Nuit” and went to New York to run it by McNally, who “hated the idea,” as the composer puts it.

“[It] was European and period and I believe very strongly in American art,” explains McNally. “If I was going to write an opera, I wanted it to be contemporary and about something that matters.”

Eight months went by--crucial time in the calendar of opera-making, given that the creation of a new work generally takes about four years--with no word from McNally. Finally, in spring 1997, McNally came to San Francisco with a list of ideas, including “Dead Man Walking.” “Lotfi loved the idea, we got the rights, Chase [Global Private Bank] came in to support my position”--funding a new composer-in-residence program.

“And it just steam-rolled from there,” says Heggie.

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They began work in March 1998, first by discussing key artistic choices. “I said I would certainly like us to be clear on voice types,” says McNally, referring to discussions that ultimately led to the Prejean character being written as a lyric mezzo-soprano and De Rocher as a baritone. “Even though I’m not writing the music, I still have feelings about all of this.”

Similarly, Heggie was consulted about the more strictly dramatic aspects of the piece. “Terrence and I talked about what scenes we saw and heard,” says the composer. “He knew very clearly that he wanted the prologue of the opera to be the staging of the crime.”

“I wanted to make it absolutely clear, unlike the film where it’s ambiguous until the very end,” says McNally. “Doubt, I don’t think, is a good musical emotion.”

The two men retreated to the New York-based McNally’s vacation home in Florida for a work session. “We went to his house in Key West, and he wrote the first-act libretto in three days,” recalls Heggie. “On the plane back from Key West, I was already making musical notes.”

That summer, Heggie composed the first-act vocal score and took it to New York for McNally to hear. “Terrence wrote the second act in December of ‘98, in about three days again, and then I wrote the second act of the opera.”

It was, by any measure, an astonishingly quick process, taking less than two years total. Heggie had the piano version of the vocal score almost done in June 1999, in anticipation of an August workshop.

That workshop, held at San Francisco Opera, proved crucial.

“Dramatically, one scene was totally reshaped and one scene we cut,” says McNally. “What I most specifically remember [reworking] is a section called ‘The Drive,’ when she’s going to meet him for the first time and she’s on the highway. It was more impressionistic, more cinematic almost, and now it’s more operatic. It was too fragmented to make it musically cohesive.”

Mantello, brought into the project by McNally, joined the team at the time of the workshop. “I had been to very few operas in my life,” says the first-time opera director, who directed McNally’s “Love! Valour! Compassion!” on stage and on film. “It certainly was daunting, but because I came at directing for the theater through a circuitous route, I felt like it could be done. I wanted to make sure that everybody knew that I was not a musician and that I didn’t read music.”

As an actor and stage director who does mainly new works, Mantello saw his mission as making his cast feel comfortable acting in a realistic style. “My thinking is to try and give the singers a sense of confidence that they are enough,” says Mantello. “They don’t have to perform it maybe as much as opera singers usually are called upon to do. It’s contemporary, American. It shouldn’t feel formal in any way.”

Packard was the only cast member to take part in the workshop. Since then, he has researched his role a good deal, including taking a trip to Louisiana’s state penitentiary in Angola, where the drama is set, at the behest of a team from San Francisco TV station KQED shooting a documentary on the making of the opera.

“I took the exact path of the last day of somebody on death row,” says Packard. “I went into the final cell where everybody who is executed at Angola spends their last day. I took the walk, which is shockingly short. It really did take the breath out of me. I think that was the most help, seeing the chamber, having that feeling of walking into it with the shackles.”

Graham, who created the role of Jordan Baker in “The Great Gatsby,” has far and away the largest part. But she feels her role’s dramatic challenges are supported by a libretto and score that is, if not easy, then readily performable.

“Jake has set most of it with a really natural speech pattern and rhythm, and that makes it easy to be very human,” she says. “A lot of times the intervals are hard because I’m singing a different tonality than the orchestra is playing, but eventually the orchestra comes around to my tonality. There are lots of jagged edges that obviously tell a very jagged story.”

What makes this role unique in Graham’s experience is its relation to today’s world. “Most of the things we as opera singers do happen either historically or never happened at all, so you’re not that close to the characters and you don’t get that emotionally involved,” says the personable mezzo-soprano. “We don’t usually get to address issues that are a part of our present.”

This speaks, of course, to the opera’s potential to strike a cultural nerve. “I’ve talked to people already who’ve said, ‘I don’t know if I can come to that opera; it sounds difficult,’ ” she says, “And I have indigestion all the time. Either that, or I can’t sleep.”

Which is the risk the creators feel American opera must take if it is to survive, let alone matter.

“It’s not Violetta Valery dying of consumption,” acknowledges McNally, referring to the heroine of “La Traviata,” which remains one of the most frequently performed operas, not to mention a financial safe bet for opera companies. “That still matters and can be made relevant. I love those operas when you can find the permanent truth in them.

“But Violetta does not affect your life as someone living . . . today the way the journey Sister Helen makes in this opera can. This is about a subject we should be thinking about as a society, as individuals. So many people just want another ‘Boheme,’ another ‘Tosca,’ and we’re never going to have an American opera unless people get committed to it.”

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* “Dead Man Walking,” San Francisco Opera, 301 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco. Friday-Oct. 28. $23-$165. (415) 864-3330.