By Aaron Keebaugh
The opera’s libretto moves back and forth fluently between Fannie Lou Hamer’s childhood years to her later struggles serving the cause of racial justice.
White Snakes Projects’s ensemble as the Freedom Democratic Party of Mississippi in Is This America?. Photo: Kathy Wittman
On June 1, 1865, in front of a large crowd gathered at New York’s Cooper Union, Frederick Douglass gave a eulogy for Abraham Lincoln. The president had been assassinated six weeks earlier because he had, for the first time, spoken in favor of voting rights for newly freed blacks.
It’s a troubling fact that one hundred years later, Civil Rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer was still fighting that same battle in her home state of Mississippi. In the process of galvanizing blacks to register to vote, she endured humiliation, threats, and even beatings that left her physically disabled. If she ever lost faith in the cause, she rarely displayed it in public. She was so successful that to this day depictions of her life cast her as a tireless social warrior. “Change takes time,” her character sings in the closing moments of Mary D. Watkins’s Is This America?, an operatic biopic that explores Hamer’s difficult quest to set aright what seemed an political impossibility during the turbulent climate of the 1960s.
Still, however honorable its treatment of a relevant subject, Is This America?, which White Snake Projects premiered at Dorchester’s Strand Theatre, has a few kinks to work out before it can successfully become a compelling heroic narrative. As music, the piece dazzles. As biography, it feels swift, even cinematic. But the matter-of-fact nature of its libretto rarely explores the emotional depths.
Written by Watkins with assistance from Cerise Lim Jacobs, the libretto moves back and forth fluently between Hamer’s childhood years to her later struggles serving the cause of racial justice. It all culminates in the disappointment she and her colleagues experienced in trying to have delegates from her Freedom Democratic Party of Mississippi seated at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. While Hamer’s speech to the DNC — televised in real life — delivers the opera’s biggest payoff, the story’s build up to that point doesn’t feel convincing or dramatic. Too often we were treated to banal descriptions of the sequence of events; the text tells us much more than it dramatizes. On top of that, even Watkins’s powerful music couldn’t always convey the requisite tension and sensitivities of Hamer’s journey — her stalwart conviction was left unamplified.
Some choices were likely aimed at smoothing over presentations of potential racial insensitivities. Hamer’s beating at the hands of white police officers in Winona, Mississippi is told to us by the chorus. Watkins’s music, with its stinging dissonances and pointed statements, was more than enough to convey the brutality on its own.
Other text settings fail to capture the full dimension of her personal trauma. In the first act, Hamer is told that she received a “Mississippi appendectomy,” a hysterectomy given without her consent. As Hamer, mezzo-soprano Deborah Nansteel sonically suggested everything engendered by the experience — from anger and despondency to the determination to do something about it. But she wasn’t given much to work with textually– beyond mere recitation of what had happened.
Eliam Ramos-Fuentes and Deborah Nansteel in White Snakes Projects’s Is This America?. Photo: Kathy Wittman
In other moments, however, words and music combine sympathetically. Nansteel was given ideal emotional ballast by Eliam Ramos Fuentes, who brought his burnished tenor to the role of Hamer’s husband, Pap. Fannie is fearless in her endeavor, but Pap expresses apprehension, worrying about the effects that the Freedom Riders and Black suffrage will have on the local whites, who frequently turned to violence in order to maintain control. Fuentes brought a touching humanity to the character; his soulful singing in his Act 1 aria conveyed devotion, undergirded by an uneasy peace, with Fannie’s path forward.
The rest of the cast sang capably as the chorus and secondary roles. The only serious flaws came with some shaky singing in the exposed high range, and in a number of instances in which the performers were drowned out by the ocean of sound emanating from the chamber orchestra. The staging, though, was brisk and effective.
Watkins’s score offered a feast of styles, ranging from Verdian lyricism to Gospel assurance. Conductor Tianhui Ng delivered surprises with every page, encouraging the dissonances and grooving rhythms to sting the ear to beguiling effect. The choruses captured as much defiance as they did celebration when the Freedom Democratic Party refused an offer from the DNC to have only two delegates seated. The opera ends by portraying the party members going home in triumph despite doing so empty-handed.
And that’s the ultimate message of Is This America? For Watkins and White Snake Projects, Hamer’s story is a morally uplifting parable about sticking to your values, no matter how agonizing it becomes. There may, in the end, be more than frustration conveyed by Hamer’s familiar saying: that she was “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” This is an opera that calls for us to stand for something greater than ourselves.
Aaron Keebaugh has been a classical music critic in Boston since 2012. His work has been featured in the Musical Times, Corymbus, Boston Classical Review, Early Music Americaand BBC Radio 3. A musicologist, he teaches at North Shore Community College in both Danvers and Lynn.
