'She Who Dared,' an opera about women in the civil rights movement, opens in Chicago

A new opera tells the story of the Black women who organized in Alabama leading up to the Montgomery bus boycott.

Transcript

JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:

A new opera which premiered this week in Chicago highlights the lesser-known women who worked alongside Rosa Parks during the Civil Rights Movement. Reporter Courtney Kueppers from member station WBEZ in Chicago has more.

COURTNEY KUEPPERS, BYLINE: When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white rider on a segregated bus, the world took notice. But as the new opera "She Who Dared" tells it, Parks was part of a larger movement that was taking hold in the late 1950s in Montgomery, Alabama. Here's librettist Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton, who wrote the story.

DEBORAH DEEP MOUTON: For me, this idea came out of my mother telling me that I had a cousin who sat on the bus before Rosa Parks. And at first, I just kind of thought she was making up things, but the more I dug into it, I actually found someone with her maiden name - Browder, Aurelia Browder - who did sit on the bus five months before Rosa Parks.

KUEPPERS: Browder was also arrested. Mouton and composer Jasmine Arielle Barnes are believed to be the first team of Black women to write a professionally staged opera. "She Who Dared" tells the story of seven women who laid the groundwork for the Montgomery bus boycott. The activists' efforts eventually changed history.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character, singing) If not here, where? If not us, who?

KUEPPERS: Over time, that history has really zeroed in on Parks. She's part of this opera, too, but in a way that reveals more of the story. She did not stay seated because she was frail or tired, says Barnes.

JASMINE ARIELLE BARNES: The reality was she trained for it. It was planned. She knew exactly when she was going to do it. She knew the bus driver.

KUEPPERS: Yet the opera humanizes a moment of doubt Parks has before she boards the bus. That moment fuels an aria, sung by Jacqueline Echols McCarley as Parks. She's wondering, will this even matter?

JACQUELINE ECHOLS MCCARLEY: (As Rosa Parks, singing) When they ask me, when they ask me to stand, will I, will I sit?

KUEPPERS: Lawrence Edelson is the head of the Chicago Opera Theater. For him, the aria also underscores that Barnes and Mouton are making their own history with this show.

LAWRENCE EDELSON: I will put that aria up with something by Puccini or by Mozart or by Verdi in terms of the emotional punch and the melodic beauty. It is just stunning.

ECHOLS MCCARLEY: (As Rosa Parks, singing) And I did what needs to be...

KUEPPERS: When Barnes and Mouton began working on the show in 2022, they could not have foreseen the world it would premiere in - one in which diversity initiatives are being scrubbed and public arts funding is facing cuts. Here's Mouton.

MOUTON: I think that we always knew the work we were doing was important, but there's, like, this incendiary nature to the work now that I didn't expect, where now this push for equality and this push for, hey, listen to us, and, we have value, feels more like a rallying cry than it does a commentary on the past.

KUEPPERS: "She Who Dared" runs through Sunday at Chicago's Studebaker Theater.

For NPR News, I'm Courtney Kueppers in Chicago.

ECHOLS MCCARLEY: (Singing, as Rosa Parks) I see a bus coming.

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