We all know about civil rights activist Rosa Parks, who on Dec. 1, 1955, defiantly refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Ala., bus to a white passenger as the Jim Crow laws at the time decreed.
But history has largely forgotten or ignored others who came before her and similarly defied the law, including four who were plaintiffs in a 1956 federal lawsuit that sought and won a decision ruling such segregation to be illegal — Aurelia Browder, Claudette Colvin, Susie McDonald and Mary Louise Smith.
“She Who Dared” tells their story.
Chicago Opera Theater — ‘She Who Dared’
The uplifting, enlightening and engaging new opera opened Tuesday evening at the Studebaker Theater and runs for two more performances through June 8. It is the fifth-ever world premiere by the ever-intrepid Chicago Opera Theater, which has built its identity alongside the much larger Lyric Opera of Chicago by focusing on the new, overlooked and unusual.
Created by composer Jasmine Arielle Barnes and librettist Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton, “She Who Dared” is billed as the first opera written by two Black women to be professionally produced. It is also the first to be sung entirely by Black women.
The work was commissioned by the American Lyric Theater, a New York organization devoted to nurturing emerging talents and developing new works. The company was founded in 2005 by Lawrence Edelson, who also serves general director of Chicago Opera Theater.
Although the Civil Rights Movement would offer plenty of potential material for a grand opera, this work is a tightly focused, intimate chamber opera, with a cast of just seven, including several singers who cover two or more roles.
Barnes and Mouton knew what they wanted to achieve within this carefully scaled piece and they don’t try to do too much or step beyond its bounds. Instead, they focus on the four women in the lawsuit and three other Montgomery activists, finding added drama in some of the inevitable conflicts within the group, especially between Parks and Colvin, a feisty 15-year-old who feels shunted aside and overlooked.
This is Barnes’ fifth opera and by far the largest, and the composer is obviously quite comfortable in the form, skillfully weaving elements of soul, gospel and blues into the classical music tradition. She makes the most of the compact, 12-member pit orchestra (an augmented version of the Black chamber-music collective, D-Composed, capably led by conductor Michael Ellis Ingram), staying within a solidly tonal idiom, but enriching her musical language with unexpected instruments like vibraphone, electronic organ and rhythm sticks.
The biggest weaknesses in the score are the quiet, introspective arias that Barnes has written for Colvin and Parks that don’t land with the full emotional punch they need. Much more effective are the showy ensemble sections and her hymn-like writing, especially the moving prayer that Colvin affectingly sings in Act 1 that begins with the “Our Father.”
Like many new operas, “She Who Dared” could use a little tightening here and there to sharpen the drama and focus the storytelling (it runs about 2½ hours with intermission and feels a bit too long), but it is a solid success overall.
Junghyun Georgia Lee’s set is wonderfully simple and highly effective — just a bus-stop bench and a lengthwise cutaway of an impressively realistic 1950s bus re-created by Scenic Inc., a set fabricator in Richmond, Calif., all placed against a blank backdrop.
Stage director Timothy Douglas fully capitalizes on these basic visual means. With stagehands constantly rotating the bus at various angles, it becomes a place of action but also a kind of stage within a stage, and he makes sure that the staging and basic choreography are always changing and the look is never repetitive.
Because there is not much action in this opera nor deep character studies, there is a danger that this work could feel a bit static and slight. But Douglas avoids both by creatively deploying his stage forces, making sure the energy flags and helping these performers find the essential, telling humanity in these historical figures.
Aiding Douglas’ efforts and enlivening and enriching the scenery is the sensitive, ever-shifting lighting by Jason Lynch that suggests the passing times of day, the swings in mood or evokes the fiery red and orange of burning Ku Klux Klan crosses on distant lawns.
The seven impeccably cast singers are strong, , each fitting superbly into the ensemble and making the most of their solo moments. Deserving special note is Jasmine Habersham, an agile-voiced soprano who poignantly conveys the adolescent angst and determination of Colvin, and soprano Jacqueline Echols McCarley as Parks.