“Dead Man Walking” at Sing Sing
The New Yorker, September 28, 2023: “Dead Man Walking” at Sing Sing
“The epigraph to Sister Helen Prejean’s book ‘Dead Man Walking,’ published in 1993, is from ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’: ‘I went right along, not fixing up any particular plan, but just trusting in Providence to put the right words in my mouth when the time come: for I’d noticed that Providence did always put the right words in my mouth, if I left it alone.’ Those lines signalled that this work by a Roman Catholic nun was literary, worldly, and irreverent in its way, and with a distinct regional tang—a story of life in her native Louisiana and the part of the country she called the Death Belt, where state executions were carried out and celebrated.
“An opera based on the book, with music by Jake Heggie and lyrics by Terrence McNally, had its première at the San Francisco Opera in 2000, and has since had more than seventy productions in the U.S. and around the world, including, in 2002, at the New York City Opera. ‘Dead Man Walking’ is, according to the Metropolitan Opera, ‘easily the most performed contemporary opera of the twenty-first century,’ and on Tuesday night a new production, directed by Ivo van Hove, opened that company’s 2023-24 season. The mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, who has performed with the Met since 2005, sings the role of Sister Helen, as she has done three times before, including at the City Opera. The bass-baritone Ryan McKinny sings the role of a man on death row whom Prejean advises named Joseph De Rocher—he is a fictionalized composite character—which McKinny also performed in 2019 at the Lyric Opera, in Chicago.
“The run-up to the Met première was thoroughly out of the ordinary. A final dress rehearsal this past Friday afternoon was followed by a reception where the principals mingled with Prejean and a group of anti-death-penalty activists she had invited along. Elizabeth Zitrin, a senior adviser to and the past president of the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, reminded everyone that the United States is the fifth-most-active executioner among nations, after China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. Then Prejean and her guests walked down the block to Fordham University’s Manhattan campus, to discuss the state of the movement with students. (‘Sister Helen and a hundred and fifty of her closest friends,’ as David Gibson, the director of Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture, put it to me.) And, on Thursday, DiDonato and members of the company will perform excerpts from the opera at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison about thirty miles north of New York City, accompanied by a chorus of incarcerated men.”
Additional reading:
The New York Times, October 4, 2023: A Death Row Opera Goes to Sing Sing, With Inmates Onstage
