Five Black and Latino teenagers were wrongfully convicted of raping and brutally assaulting a white woman in 1989. The boys’ legal case gripped and divided the nation, and symbolized systemic injustices within the legal system for communities of color. All five men were exonerated over a decade later.
Detroit Opera brings the Pulitzer Prize-winning opera The Central Park Five to audiences on May 16 and 18. Award-winning director Nataki Garrett talked about bringing this powerful piece to the stage, and why it’s so relevant for audiences right now.
“I love that we're doing this opera in Detroit, which has a significant black population, because there are parts of this story that are a part of our collective consciousness, both through memory but also through experience,” Garrett told Stateside.
In 1989, Tricia Meili was running in Central Park in New York City when she was assaulted and raped. Five teenagers were convicted. They were Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, and Korey Wise. After a series of confessions, the teenagers were charged with the offenses and served sentences ranging from seven and 13 years. The confessions were subsequently classified as having been obtained through police coercion.
Garrett grew up in Oakland, California – about 3,000 miles from the opera’s scene. There, a month before her high school graduation, Garrett was well aware of the case, and in her mind it was wrong, she said.
“I grew up at a time when teenagers – black teenagers – were already considered to be statistics, by the way that the media talked about us, by the sort of mandates around the war on drugs,” Garrett said. “They had really branded a whole generation of young people, as if we were all doing the same thing and having the same experience.”
Garrett directed the opera’s Portland production before she received a call about a Detroit remount. She didn’t hesitate to say, "Yes!"
“This kind of work is actually at the core of why I even am an artist, to tell these stories effectively, to make sure I honor those who have been victimized, to find that little bit of joy and hope that comes out of the aftermath of a story like this,” Garrett said.
Garrett designed the performance to highlight the emotional depth of the story. Early in the process, she organized a table read. Composer Anthony Davis created the music to convey the same emotional intensity as the spoken words. Garrett aimed for the performance to embody this intensity, as she couldn’t “risk the singers hiding behind the notes,” she explained.
“The first thing was, how can we create a container for the story so that the bulk of the sort of visual landscape of the story can be held in the mise-en-scene and not necessarily have to be carried by the performers?”
President Donald Trump is one of the play’s characters, given that he bought full-page newspaper ads to demand that the teenagers be charged with the death penalty. The so-called "Central Park Five" filed an ongoing lawsuit against Trump for “false and defamatory” statements during the September presidential debate last year.
Garrett hopes people will see how injustices that plagued the community over 30 years ago are still at play today, she said. Beyond that, she wants the audience to see that there’s been forward movement.
“I like to look at this particular piece as a part of the collective consciousness of black and brown people or politically oppressed people – that the exoneration is a joyful and necessary part of knowing that at some point the universe will speak back and the wrongs will be answered,” Garrett said.
