The Company of The Passion of Mary Cardwell Dawson. Photo credit: Eric Waters
RALEIGH, NC – It’s understandable if there’s a certain sense of familiarity to Sandra Seaton‘s The Passion of Mary Cardwell Dawson, a biographical homage to the unsung founder of the National Negro Opera Company, the foremost, if not first, professional Black opera company in the United States in the 1940s and 50s.
Playwrights with a bit more gravitas than Andrew Lloyd Webber have taken us behind the scenes at the opera before now. Terrence McNally probed the latter days of the legendary Maria Callas in his Tony award-winning 1996 drama, Master Class. Local opera buffs are more likely than most to have seen it, since notable productions have graced the stages at three of the region’s largest companies, PlayMakers Rep, Theatre in the Park, and Theatre Raleigh, in recent years.
The structural similarities between that work and Passion, whose North Carolina Opera production this week featured iconic mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves reprising the title role she originated in its 2021 world premiere, are too striking to ignore. Both are stage plays with spoken dialogue interlaced with live music, sung by operatic actors accompanied by a pianist on stage. Both take place in the thoroughly unglamorous milieu of a rehearsal room, where an older, wiser opera singer retreats into private, intimate musical reveries that reveal her lived experiences, dreams and ideals. Finally, in both, the senior artist spends much of her time none too gently critiquing the works of two women and one man: student artists out of their element, not entirely prepared to have their performances professionally assessed and found wanting. The more accomplished artist in each repeatedly has to stop them to analyze minutiae and major mistakes.
Unfortunately, those last details are the ones that render The Passion of Mary Cardwell Dawson unbelievable.
Supposedly, the central dilemma in playwright and librettist Seaton’s account of Dawson’s struggles involves a production of Carmen threatened by the weather in Washington in late August 1943. By then, her company had performed multiple times outdoors on a floating stage: a barge docked along the banks of the Potomac River in the city’s Watergate district. That choice allowed her to avoid the necessity of booking odious venues like Constitution Hall which would remain racially segregated until well into the 1950s.
Denyce Graves as Mary Cardwell Dawson. Photo credit: Eric Waters
But after uncertain weather kept crowds away from an earlier performance of Aida, Dawson’s back is now against an economic wall. Union contracts have been signed; actors, musicians and technicians will be paid whether there is a performance or not. A cancelled production could bankrupt the company. As a thunderstorm rages on the morning of the performance, Dawson agonizes over a producer’s unenviable choice: scrub the show, or capitulate on her ethics and rent a venue where Black audience members would only be allowed to sit in the back of the hall.
But Passion loses focus – and believability – amid indulgent comic shenanigans during Dawson’s supposedly final pre-show rehearsal with her lead actors for Carmen.
Johnnie Felder and Diana Thompson-Brewer as Don Jose and Micaëla. Photo credit: Eric Waters
Under Kimille Howard‘s direction, horndog Frank, the actor hired to play Don Jose (tenor Johnnie Felder) and a chipper, back-stabbing Isabelle, who plays Micaëla (mezzo-soprano Diana Thompson-Brewer), don’t know their blocking on the day of the show. It’s even less auspicious when Dawson finds herself demoted from director to chaperone when she has to repeatedly intervene, physically, to keep the two characters from pawing at each other during a burlesqued rendition of Carmen‘s originally non-erotic “Parlez-moi de ma mere” (“Tell me about my mother”).
That’s not the worst. In Seaton’s script, Phoebe, the actor playing Carmen (Taylor-Alexis Dupont), looks up anxiously from her script and pleads, “I’ll do my best” in a vacillating voice, before Dawson has to teach her self-confidence and the rudiments of Carmen’s characterization, mere hours before she’s to go on stage in the title role. Ideally, that would also involve keeping her from ridiculously stalking about the stage, as Howard bids her, in a comic cross somewhere between jazz era great Cab Calloway and a leering Norma Desmond with advanced arthritis.
Friends, if your show’s got this many problems on the day it opens, it’s doomed. That weather is the least of your worries.
Taylor-Alexis Dupont as Phoebe, as Carmen. Photo credit: Eric Waters
We can understand Howard and Seaton wanting to leaven the dramatic tension with a bit of humor in the midst, and both sequences got abundant laughs. But when none of the actors in Dawson’s Carmen are depicted in a professional light – except when they sing – how much does this production actually help lift up the image and reputation of Black stage artists in the 1940s? Particularly when Dawson has to give Phoebe a how-to line reading of the opera’s famous Habanera, “L’amour est un oiseau rebelle” (“Love is a rebellious bird”), the day she’s going up in it?
At least Graves got to revisit a favorite aria in the process.
For all of this, her strongest work comes during the new music Seaton and composer Carlos Simon add to the play. Under Donald Lee III‘s musical direction, she walks a sensuous, suspenseful tightrope during “Divided Soul,” a song of artistic self-conflict. A smoky undercurrent flows during “She Steps Onto a Floating Stage,” before its character’s poignant petition to simply be remembered.
That theme recurs throughout this work. Early on, Dawson sternly advises her charges: “You are here to learn one thing: how to be remembered.”
Memory, however, is ultimately a shared responsibility, and posterity’s interest and competence in that work remains an ever open question.
Dawson, a native of Mayodan, NC, was finally inducted into North Carolina’s Music Hall of Fame in October. But as for this act of memory, when its principled principal character is so needlessly surrounded by incompetents she supposedly chose and trained, characters who fundamentally undermine this project’s central mission, The Passion of Mary Cardwell Dawson remains a bittersweet and compromised triumph at best.
Despite what’s seen here, the National Negro Opera Company was not an amateurish ship of fools. It is a disservice to depict them as such. On the basis of this production, we still await a work that remembers that dedicated community of professional artists in their true light. This one’s not up for the job.
