‘Dead Man Walking’ Returns, Amid a New National Moment

For the past week, the U.S. government has demanded that Americans support a blatant contradiction: to honor the memory of a free-speech promoting provocateur by attacking and firing those who exercise their right to free speech.

That’s the TLDR of it, anyway — I’m glossing over all the parts about bullets etched with furry lingo, comparisons between abortion and the holocaust, a future assassin cosplaying in a slav squat, the ongoing demonization of trans people and qualified Black women, and an encroaching takeover of American news media by a thin-skinned authoritarian president.

The central contradiction of the opera Dead Man Walking, which opened this week at San Francisco Opera, seems quaint by comparison. Is there a moral argument for a government to kill its own people as punishment for killing? As the author of the book Dead Man Walking, Sister Helen Prejean never could have realized how uncomplicated this question would seem to an audience wrestling with the terrifying notion of American fascism.

On Wednesday night, during a return to the War Memorial Opera House 25 years after its seismic world premiere here in 2000, Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally’s widely acclaimed, oft-performed work felt not like one of the most successful operas of the modern age, but one already out of date. The death penalty? We’ve got bigger problems now.

Such is the cruel retroactive shadow of the current regime; one that’s unfair to this moving and still quite contemporary production.

Dead Man Walking opens with nude actors on stage and a horrific crime scene that’s shocking even by today’s standards. The multilevel set design by Michael McGarty and lighting by Brian Nason cohere to create a distinct, new world on stage of eerie woodland and oppressive barbed-wire fencing. McNally’s libretto is rich as ever, and under the baton of Patrick Summers, who also conducted the 2000 premiere, Heggie’s expressive, complex score soars beautifully.

And it’s not as if capital punishment has receded into the past. Since Dead Man Walking’s premiere, California voters have rejected two state propositions to repeal the death penalty, and Governor Gavin Newsom placed a moratorium on executions just six years ago, in 2019.

Which brings us to Ryan McKinny as death row inmate Joseph De Rocher, who wrestles with his conscience, worries for his mother and fears his ultimate fate. Rod Gilfry as Owen Hart, the father of a murdered girl, is a surprise standout, and both he and McKinny bring the required pathos and frustration to their roles.

Susan Graham, who performed the role of Prejean in 2000, returns in a full-force performance of emotion as De Rocher’s mother, grasping to understand the actions of her son and state government alike. Graham’s stellar performance made me wish I’d seen her in the original, 25 years ago.

Mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton, as Sister Helen Prejean, now has the task of bringing Dead Man Walking’s moral quandary to life. Though Barton was raised in the south — the story takes place in Louisiana — she plays the conflicted nun a little too meekly, combined with the occasional smirk or chortle. The role of Prejean calls for something in the middle, a steadier balance of pious trepidation and down-to-earth humanity.

As for sheer musicality, though, when Barton and Brittany Renee, as Sister Rose, sing in duet, something special enters the air. In multiple moments of the cast and chorus singing together, and the orchestra at forte, it creates opera at its best and most transcendent.

Prejean’s goal is an impossible one. Her God tells her she must have empathy for all, including racists and violent criminals, plus the families of the victims of racists and violent criminals, and it eats her up. With apologies for making a comparison to the 1995 film, that’s what Susan Sarandon conveyed so wonderfully on screen, and what I found myself missing most on the opera house stage – especially since all the other elements in this production are radiantly present.

Some of us may be feeling like Sister Helen Prejean this week, asked, as we are, to have sympathy for those with views and actions we find abhorrent. The thing is, most of us are not nuns. And none of us are saints. Nobody’s heart is large enough to let in all the evil in the world, and certainly not this week. Twenty-five years later, the challenge that Dead Man Walking hands us is more untenable than ever.

‘Dead Man Walking’ runs through Sunday, Sept. 28, at the War Memorial Opera House (301 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco). Tickets and more information here.