Baritone Rod Gilfry was booed in Detroit.
Not
surprising, since Gilfry portrays slave master Edward Gaines in "Margaret
Garner," the Richard Danielpour/Toni Morrison opera which receives its
Cincinnati Opera premiere with performances at 8 p.m. Thursday, Saturday and
July 22 at Music Hall. (The world premiere was at the Detroit Opera House May
7.)
Starring with Gilfry are mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves, baritone Gregg
Baker and soprano Angela Brown. Graves sings Margaret, whose 1856 escape from
slavery in Boone County and killing of her child by her own hand when faced with
re-capture have become the stuff of legend. Baker is Margaret's husband Robert,
with Brown as Robert's mother Cilla.
Directing is Kenny Leon, director of
the 2004 Tony Award-winning revival of a "Raisin in the Sun" on Broadway.
Conductor is Stefan Lano, who conducted Cincinnati Opera's "Dead Man Walking" in
2002.
Cincinnati and Michigan Opera Theater have joined with Opera
Company of Philadelphia in a $5.5 million, three-way co-commission that also
marks the first main stage commission by Cincinnati opera in its 85-year
history.
Gilfry expects the response to be "much more intense" in
Cincinnati than in Detroit. The historical context of "Margaret Garner" is
more of an issue for Cincinnati Opera than Detroit, he said.
Like
Morrison's 1987 novel "Beloved," also inspired by the Garner tragedy, "Margaret
Garner" is a fictionalized account.
Known facts: Margaret Garner was a
slave at Maplewood Farm, then owned by Archibald Gaines. (He becomes Edward in
the opera because "Edward" is more singable.) A portion of the 1850s-era Gaines
house still stands on the property, a designated historic site located on
Richwood Road in Boone County near Richwood Presbyterian Church. (Visits are
arranged through the Boone County Historical Society.)
Margaret married
Robert Garner, a slave on an adjoining farm owned by James Marshall. She,
Robert, Robert's parents and Margaret's four children fled across the frozen
Ohio River on Jan. 26, 1856 and took refuge in a cabin on Mill Creek near
Cincinnati, owned by Margaret's free cousin, Joseph Kite.
They were
re-captured the next day by Gaines, a Marshall family member and federal
officers. Margaret killed her two-year-old daughter Mary during the melee. She
was tried in Cincinnati pursuant to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which obligated
Free states to return runaway slaves. It was a celebrated trial - actually just
a hearing before a federal commissioner (court records are lost). And it pitted
pro-slavery advocates against abolitionists, both strongly represented in
Cincinnati by the pro-slavery Cincinnati Enquirer and the anti-slavery
Cincinnati Gazette.
The Garners were remanded to their owners, then "sold
down the river," where Margaret died of typhoid fever on a Mississippi
plantation in 1858. Gaines died of tetanus after stepping on a rusty nail in
1871.
Morrison's libretto elaborates on this, in effect, giving a broader
picture of slavery and its horrendous abuses. In the opera, Gaines rapes
Margaret and Robert is lynched during re-capture. Margaret kills two of her
children, not one, is put on trial in Kentucky, not Ohio, and condemned to death
for theft of property (her children being Gaines' property).
In true
operatic fashion, she is granted clemency - on the gallows, noose around her
neck - after intervention by Gaines at the prodding of his abolitionist daughter
- but she trips the gallows and kills herself instead.
This is hot button
stuff - a kind of modern day "Uncle Tom's Cabin" - and as likely to arouse
passions today as did the actual pre-Civil War events. There is plausible
speculation that Gaines fathered the murdered child, which also adds tinder to
the fire.
Complicating the issue is Steven Weisenburger's 1998 book
"Modern Medea," which explores the Garner case in elaborate detail, with
particular attention to the trial. A large number of errors have been alleged,
many factual, which has further incensed descendants of the Gaines family and
their Northern Kentucky neighbors, who feel that the book is unfairly biased
against them.
Alabama resident John C. Gaines, a collateral descendant of
Archibald Gaines and Gaines family historian, has stated that he will not attend
the opera.
Weisenburger, former professor at the University of Kentucky
now holder of the Mossiker Chair in Humanities at Southern Methodist University
in Dallas, will address the Fourth Biennial Conference of the Toni Morrison
Society, which meets in Cincinnati Thursday through Sunday .
Tours of
Maplewood by cast members, Cincinnati Opera board members and others have
produced heated exchanges over the nature of slavery in Northern Kentucky, and
set nerves on edge. Weisenburger has been notified that he is not welcome at
Maplewood.
To Gilfry, all of this could have been prevented by a simple
expedient, changing the name of the slave owner. This was done, in fact, for a
mock trial of Margaret Garner, presented by the Ohio Chapter of the American
College of Trial Lawyers at the annual meeting of the Federal Bar Association in
Cincinnati last October. Gaines' name was changed to Davis Jefferson for that
event, which will be repeated at 7 p.m. July 19 at the National Underground
Railroad Freedom Center. (Morrison does not use the name Gaines in
"Beloved.")
"I don't think the opera benefits from my character being
called Gaines," Gilfry said. "I would like to go on record as saying that I'm
fully aware that the character of Edward Gaines is largely fictionalized. What
the opera has become - and should be - is an opera about the story of Margaret
Garner and about slaves before the Civil War and the oppression they suffered.
Gaines is the one figure in the entire opera where there's still family, and he
is not portrayed accurately. I don't think they deserve to be punished for the
actions of their forefathers.
"The other side of the coin, though, is
that the suffering of the slaves is a hundred times - a thousand times - more
important than a few people's hurt feelings."
Gilfry believes descendants
of slave owners should be "hyper-sensitive" to what happened. Though unconnected
with the history of slavery (Gilfry's maternal ancestors do include General
Custer of the Battle of Little Bighorn, he said), Gilfry feels an obligation to
"make good for this slavery thing. I do feel like I have to do penance in some
way. I feel dirty, especially being as white as I am."
For the record,
Gilfry, 46, is blonde, 6-feet-3 inches tall, and one of the most physically
imposing baritones on the opera scene today. He made opera history with his
portrayal of Stanley Kowalski in the world premiere of Andre Previn's "A
Streetcar Named Desire" for San Francisco Opera in 1998. He has also starred as
Czar Nicholas II in Deborah Drattell's "Nicholas and Alexandra" in San Francisco
and Nathan in Nicholas Maw's "Sophie's Choice" in London.
In 2008, he
will premiere the title role in "The Fly" by Howard Shore (composer for "The
Lord of the Rings" trilogy) for Los Angeles Opera. (Yes, that fly, chillingly
portrayed by Jeff Goldblum in the 1986 film.)
A California native, Gilfry
trained at California State University at Fullerton and the University of
Southern California before apprenticing at Los Angeles Opera, where he returns
this fall for Offenbach's "Grand Duchess of Gerolstein" and Leoncavallo's "I
Pagliacci." His cabaret act with pianist Christopher Denny is available on DVD
at his web site www.rodgilfry.com.
Gilfry brings a complex humanity to
Edward Gaines in "Margaret Garner."
"He's not a one-dimensional villain,
an all-bad, black-and-white character. From the very beginning, you see he has a
great love of the land, a great love for nature and a tremendous love for his
daughter. He's had a tragic past. His wife has died and left him a widower, so
you're inclined to be sympathetic until he starts behaving badly."
What
Morrison built into Gaines' character, he said, is "a desire to prove
himself.
"He was run out of town 20 years earlier because he had an
undesirable episode with a girl in town. He comes back and feels like 'I'm going
to show them. I've got money and I'm going to show them I'm a big man and undo
the disgrace I left with.' "
If he could speak for the Gaines family -
and other Americans today - this is what Gilfry would say:
"I understand
that I need to be hyper-sensitive to what my forefathers did. It's not for me to
say when the descendants of those who were enslaved should be finished talking
about it. We should continue to have a dialogue and listen to them until they
feel that they are done with it, not say, 'Come on now, we've said we're sorry.
You have a Freedom Center now. Can you please just drop it?' "
Adding her
voice to the need for dialogue is Dr. Anne Butler, director of the Center of
Excellence for the Study of Kentucky African Americans at Kentucky State
University in Frankfort. Butler, who was involved in archaeological digs at
Maplewood in 1998, calls "Margaret Garner" a "lightning rod around which the
discomforts people have about slavery are unfolding. We haven't done enough
talking about it. When I came here in 1996 and dug around in textbooks, the
writers pictured a kinder and gentler slavery than in the Deep
South."
This attitude cannot be sustained, she said. "The institution of
slavery denied the basic democratic ideals our country was founded on. 'Margaret
Garner' serves as a symbol of how it devastated the lives of its victims,
particularly in the context of family.
"In reality, that's what
the Gaines descendants are doing, she said. "Standing up for their
family."
( Mary Ellyn Hutton is a direct descendant of Henry Clay, drafter of
the Compromise of 1850, which included the Fugitive Slave Act.)
(first
published in The Cincinnati Post July 12, 2005)