the face
of god
by Douglas Messerli
Terrence MacNally (libretto, based
on the book by Sister Helen Prejean), Jake Heggie (composer) Dead Man Walking / Santa Monica,
California, The Broad Stage, Santa Monica College Performing Arts Center,
Sunday, March 8, 2015
Jake Heggie’s opera Dead Man Walking, based on the book by Sister Helen Prejean and the 1995 movie directed by Tim Robbins, is a powerful and incredibly moving work that in its intensity is also somewhat difficult to endure. If by the end of the first act, one feels worn out as the result of the story’s horror and sorrow and the demands of its audience’s empathy and tears, by the opera’s end, whether or not one is convinced of the transformative power of human and spiritual love, one is still left with a third corpse on stage which the society itself—and the audience as part of that society—has allowed to happen. No matter what one feels about capital punishment, and its justification for an act that so brutally left two young adults dead, one cannot but find it difficult to match the faith and generosity of heart expressed by the work’s major character, Sister Helen and the seemingly inexhaustibility of the singer, Jennifer Rivera.
Certainly Heggie’s soaring and roiling score (which, fortunately, only
occasionally, borders on well-written film music) and Terence MacNally’s
well-honed script is somewhat manipulative. And even from its earliest scenes
of The Prologue the opera understandably sanitizes the rape of the young girl,
the shooting of the young boy, and the numerous stabbings of the girl after she
screams in reaction to the boy’s death. Despite the operatic nudity of its
characters and a quite literal enactment of rape, no amount of balletic
simulation can capture the crude monstrousness of the original act. And,
accordingly, particularly since we are haunted with the ghosts of these two
beautiful children throughout the rest of the opera, the dramatization cannot
fully signify the loss and horror later claimed by the parents and friends. And
no matter how horrible we know the murderer, Joseph De Rocher (Michael Mayes),
to be, we are able to more fully sympathize with him than we possibly could be
in “real” life. Although Michael Mayes as Joseph, quite brilliantly, through
both voice and theatrical interpretation, conveys the original’s hubristic
dismissal of all guilt while yet embracing of “the bad man” he recognizes
himself to be, a singing jailbird, even one heavily tattooed and coarse, is
simply not as horrifying as a disdainful, swearing survivor waiting out his end
in the Louisiana prison in Angola. Indeed, given the character’s swagger, we
have difficulties in comprehending his terrifying fear of death, and his
determination to request his new epistolary pen-pal, the naïve Sister Helen, to
be his spiritual survivor.
The
composer and writer also stack the deck more than a little by beginning the
opera in the children’s mission where Helen, along with Sisters Rose (the
powerfully-voiced Talise Trevigne), Catherine and Lilianne, work with their
children in near-perfect harmony as they sing out the spiritual, “He Will
Gather Us Around Him”—which gradually becomes an anthem for Helen throughout
the rest of the opera. Strangely, and I am sure unintentionally, such a joyful
presentation of her life among the obviously socially and financially
disadvantaged children, suggests why this loveable being might have gone
looking for new challenges, quickly made apparent in her decision to meet with
the much-hated prisoner. Despite the assertion of Rosie and others that Helen
should stay at home and minister to those who daily need her, the
nun-on-the-run (as Heggie engagingly described her in a pre-opera discussion),
is determined to challenge herself by encountering a real evil that the
audience does not yet completely comprehend.
Accordingly, her long trip to Angola, which becomes a kind of
metaphorical journey into hell, and which is quickly transformed into a
symbolic voyage to love and God, seems overlong and a bit inexplicable. It is
only when she finally arrives at the prison and meets with the cynical and
rather ungodly prison Chaplin Father Grenville (John Duykers) and the head
warden that we begin to perceive the horrific world in which she has become
involved.
The
paired-down production at the Broad theater used moveable prison gates to
suggestively convey not only a much larger prison community but, by keeping the
scenery in constant motion, recreated the psychological dimensions of a woman
(and this a case a previously secluded
woman) being suddenly tossed into a world of violent, testosterone-driven, and
despairing men. If she is terrified, Helen is also drawn to this desolate spot
to prove her own “marriage” to God.
In
fact, however, it is not the prisoners who become her biggest challenges, but
their families, both De Rocher’s obviously lower class mother (performed by the
remarkable Catherine Cook) and her other children—who equally turn to Helen for
spiritual support—but the horrifyingly cold-hearted and intensely angry parents
of the dead children, dramatically realized by Robert Orth as Owen Hart, the
father of the murdered girl, reprising his original role. By the time Helen
determines to stand by Joseph through the inevitably failed hearing to spare
his life, the sides have been drawn and, whether or not she has determined to
stand with or against this horrible sinner, she is clearly made to feel that
she has chosen to join forces with the devil instead of God.
If the
opera, heretofore, has alternated between soaring arias of hope and belief and
dour proclamations of doubt and eternal sorrow, it now bursts into a
cacophonous chorus of impossible disharmony, as Helen falls into a faint,
famished from not only a failure to eat but out of the real possibility that
her faith is insufficient to heal the huge gash in the human weal De Rocher has
left behind.
The
audience members seemed almost stunned as they stumbled to the restrooms during
the intermission. Surely the opera had no choice to be release them from the
tears it had revealed in Act I. Yet Act II begins with both central figures
suffering terrible dreams, De Rocher terrified of now being “a dead man walking,”
and Helen conjuring up the ghosts of his victims. Once more Sister Rose
attempts to not only allay Helen’s fears but to allow her a way out of the box
of commitment into which she has allowed herself to be entrapped. Yet suddenly,
after Helen speaks of difficultly of forgiveness, Rose grows into a full
dimensional figure as she proffers the possibility that Helen has, herself, not
yet fully forgiven Joseph De Rocher for his sins. Her aria suggesting that such
nonjudgmental love is almost always one without words is perhaps one the most beautiful
in an opera of high lyrical intensity. And it is Rose’s advice upon which the
remainder of the opera pivots. How, we wonder, will Helen find a way to forgive
someone who not only does not seek forgiveness, but refuses to forgive himself
by remaining in a shell of self-denial, blaming his brother for his own
horrific actions.
While
the first act represented a nightmarish voyage for all its figures, the second
act attempts to reveal, often in very small increments, how that nightmare
might come unwound and even redeem some of the many sufferers of these
traumatic events. If Rose has described how mothers show their children how
they love and forgive, Joseph’s rather inarticulate mother stunningly
articulates her love by refusing to see her son as the murderous adult he now
is, endowing him instead with all the memories she has of him as a
porpoise-like child (the porpoise itself being a standard Christian symbol of
God and God’s love). Her simple request for a family photograph is so
poignantly painful in its ridiculous attempt to commemorate what everyone would
want forgotten, that director Brian Staufenbiel, turns the scene into a long
frieze that emblematizes the moment—revealing it for the folly and desire for a
normative life made clearly impossible by social, cultural, and political
events. If there was one moment in this opera that spoke out against the
absurdity of taking a human life in order to demonstrate society’s horror of
murder, it was this. For in that single snapshot, life becomes eternal; a dead
man does not exist in a work of art, however ordinary it is, and even if that
artifact is destroyed or lost.
Stubborn
to the end, Helen ultimately forces the frightened prisoner to confess, in her
mind, freeing him to be forgiven by God. But, in fact, his confession, as he
has argued all along, does not free him as much as it frees her and all the
others against whom he has so transgressed. She is now able to truly forgive
him. But her expression of that forgiveness is not in a touch, a silent act, a
reiterated gentility, but in her insistence that she herself is the embodiment
of God, and that in his greatest moment of fear, if he only look into her face,
he will see love—which, ultimately, in this work, is the same as God.
In
short, Sister Helen, instead of mystifying the presence of God, has, almost in
an act of apostasy, turned the Holy into a kind of graven image, her own. But
this work is not, fortunately, a religious text. And we can, of course, forgive
her in the fact that she has humanized the mysterious presence Who cannot be
named. His name is legion, and He is us. Such a secular theology, finally, is
one we can all, even the most reprehensible among us, embrace.
Los Angeles, March 10, 2015
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