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Home > News > News Details
The endurance of 'Dead Man Walking'
by Stephanie Salter (San Francisco Examiner)
9/30/2000
Almost 20 years ago, when Sister Helen Prejean chose to correspond with a death row inmate, she would have snorted in disbelief had someone issued the following prophecy:
"This will lead to you witnessing five executions. You'll write a book about them called 'Dead Man Walking.' The book will be a bestseller. Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon will make a film from the book. Playing you, Sarandon will win an Academy Award.
"Then, on Oct. 7, 2000, you will sit in the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House and watch the world premiere of Jake Heggie's opera, 'Dead Man Walking.' It will star Susan Graham and Frederica von Stade, two of the globe's top mezzo sopranos. The librettist will be a three-time Tony Award winner, Terrence McNally.
"Oh, and, by the way, your name will become synonymous in the United States with forgiveness, mercy and Christ's call for unconditional love."
As is usually the case for us mortals, there was no such prophet back in 1982. Prejean, a sister of the Roman Catholic order of St. Joseph of Medaille in New Orleans, knew only that a condemned killer wanted to talk to her. So she drove three hours across Louisiana to accomodate him.
"It's like one of the lines that Susan came up with in the movie, when someone talks about her being drawn to be a spiritual advisor on death row," said Prejean. "She says: 'I feel more caught than drawn.' It's this human thing. You get involved with something, but you don't know what you're getting into."
Prejean's own humanness is something she works hard to remind people of as she travels the country "just tellin' my story." In a culture that is starved for heroes, she is often as not approached as if she were a living saint, someone who dwells in a rarefied realm unreachable for the rest of us.
"It's true," she said. "People come up and just want to touch me. They do everything but genuflect."
So how can anybody, even a nun, manage to keep from — as they say in the South — drinking her own whiskey? How can she keep her ego in check? How does she combat the adoration?
"I don't have to combat it because of the place I stand," Prejean said. "I have been with people who have suffered beyond description as the loved ones of victims of crime. The presence of that white-hot heat of human suffering keeps me centered."
To accept adoration for her potent work against the death penalty, she said, "would be getting off on people's suffering. I do that, I'm a pervert."
Perhaps more than anything, it is this dual commitment of Prejean's that infuses her struggle with an honesty and purity that continue to attract followers: She takes on the suffering of both sides of capital punishment, that of the condemned killer and his family and that of the victims' families.
"I find it harder than anything to stand and be with the pain of people who've lost a child like that. But loving someone who's done a terrible crime means also holding in your soul the pain of the victims," she said. "There's a tension there that I think most people, understandably, back off from."
Feisty, funny and feminist, Prejean is about as far as you can get from the stereotypical cinema nun (think Jennifer Jones in "Song of Bernadette"). God, she says, "works in sneaky, sneaky ways.'
And she has no fear that her simple-but-profound message will get lost or diluted on the grand opera stage.
"I see this as another way to get the story out," she said.
As she learned from the collaboration with Robbins and Sarandon, and as she continues to learn from the tens of thousands of people who buy her book and come to hear her speak, "There's an energy flow when you do this work.
"You don't create it from whole cloth; you're being aligned with the spiritual energies of love. That love brings with it an energy and a humility, and it awakens the love in others.
"Jake and Terrence and everybody else who worked on this opera have portrayed the central themes of the story I've been telling. They got it. Crime and the death penalty are all about separating people out from the rest of society. What this work is about is like the little children's song Jake has in the beginning of the opera, it's about gathering us around."
"Dead Man Walking" will be performed eight times at the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House Oct. 7-28.
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The
Moratorium Campaign
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