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Chicago’s Lyric Opera presents a new work called Blue conducted by Joseph Young. In their Lyric debuts, librettist and director Tazewell Thompson and composer Jeanine Tesori (Tony winner for Fun Home) present the saga of a middle-class Black family in Harlem, in English with English supertitles, in two acts. This is Tesori’s third opera, a verismo, a late 19th-century Italian style focusing on gritty realism.
The Father (bass Kenneth Kellogg in his Lyric debut) is a rookie uniformed police officer and expectant father with The Mother (mezzo-soprano Zoie Reams). They deliver a baby boy who grows into a typical angst-ridden vegan artist activist hoodie-wearing teenager (Travon D. Walker). His father attempts to give his child “the talk,” Black parents’ ubiquitous warnings about how racists will likely target them and cause them harm throughout their American lives, and how to prepare for that eventuality.
This community’s imperative kicked off opening night’s pre-opera talk, where Lyric Unlimited Scholar-in-Residence Dr. Antonio C. Cuyler, in conversation with Dr. Naomi André (the David G. Frey Distinguished Professor in Music, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), launched the chat by asking audience members to shout out a Black victim of police violence. Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland, Trayvon Martin, Laquan McDonald, George Floyd and many more names filled the air like the bullets that took their lives.
Blue is painfully simple in that way. Not much action but loads of community camaraderie and reflections on violence. What should be an ordinary life of growing up in a supportive neighborhood becomes burgeoning generational trauma. Donald Eastman’s set is simple: a stylized projection of a block of Harlem Brownstones provides the backdrop, with simple furniture pieces pushed on and off as needed, such as a bed, some chairs, a dining table and side buffet, a dresser and a coffin. Jessica Jahn’s costumes are plain, consisting of modern shirts, pants and dresses to keep the focus on the strong voices and the desire to be a normal family, not part of a staggering statistic.
There are some laughs. Mother’s chorus of girlfriends surround her like the Graces and cosign on her love of “a man in a uniform,” especially since he gets full insurance including dental. When The Son is born, he looks “like a Black exclamation point on white linen paper.” Shocking images are also provoked (after all, “opera scenes are artificial, but the feelings are real,” as the panelists noted before the show): The Son’s slain body is “stored in the drawer of human file cabinet.” The Father’s own trio of friends note that it’s open season for the Great White Hunter. The Reverend (baritone Norman Garrett) comforts the distraught Father, noting “Your heart is broken. I hear it knocking against your ribs.” Friends of the family induct Mother into “the sad sorority of mothers without sons.”
Collectively, the characters ask, “What were the sins of our ancestors that make us suffer so?” This agonizing, ever-timely piece is reminiscent of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “the talk” book, Between the World and Me, which chronicles the waste of the growing African American body count:
“And it occurred to me then that you would not escape, that there were awful men who’d laid plans for you, and I could not stop them. Prince Jones was the superlative of all my fears. And if he, good Christian, scion of a striving class, patron saint of the twice as good, could be forever bound, who then could not? And the plunder was not just of Prince alone. Think of all the love poured into him. Think of the tuition for Montessori and music lessons. Think of the gasoline expended, the treads worn carting him to football games, basketball tournaments, and Little League. Think of the time spent regulating sleepovers. Think of the surprise birthday parties, the daycare, and the reference checks on babysitters. Think of World Book and Childcraft. Think of checks written for family photos. Think of credit cards charged for vacations. Think of soccer balls, science kits, chemistry sets, racetracks, and model trains. Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into him, sent flowing back to the earth.”
Black lives matter and now an opera production has joined the chorus asking, “How many sons do we have to give?”
Blue continues at Lyric Opera of Chicago, 20 N. Wacker Drive, with four more performances through December 1. Running time is 2.5 hours. Tickets start at $49. The show is for mature audiences due to racial slurs, profanity and an off-stage death by police violence.
For more information on this and other productions, see theatreinchicago.com.
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