Events at the BCT

$15 General Admission
$10 w/ Student ID/ Senior

An opera set in a death row visiting room. A mass murderer who spends his days sweeping the floor. A young mother visiting her condemned husband. These are the ingredients of “Small Box,” a new opera at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater, one night only on November 7 at 7 p.m.

With music by Herman Whitfield III, a graduate of the Indiana University School of Music, and libretto by Bruce L. Pearson, a retired teacher and volunteer prison worker, the hour-long drama takes a serious look at the death penalty without arguing either for or against.

The opera has a cast of eight, six men and two women. Two of the men are prison officers assigned to the death row visiting room. The officer in charge is an older man while his assistant is a new officer, still learning the ropes.

Of the inmates, one is a multiple murderer who, because of a judge’s error, had his death sentence reduced to life in prison. He works as the unit’s janitor. Among the other inmates, one is a mentally retarded man who is visited by his attorney, a young woman. Another is a mentally deranged youth who heard voices telling him to go to a schoolyard and shoot the children there. Finally, there is a young man who was involved in a murder for which his partner has all ready been executed. He has now received an execution date and is being visited by his wife and infant son.

The opera, according to the librettist, offers a fairly typical cross section of those who find their way to death row and leaves the audience to draw their own conclusions. The composer is a two-time winner of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s Emerging African-American Composers competition. His works have been performed by the Detroit Symphony, the Indianapolis Symphony and other orchestras. Whitfield has also studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music and the Oberlin Conservatory. He has composed music for films and was selected as a participant in the 2007 Aspen Music Festival and the School’s Film Scoring Institute. This is his first opera.

The composer, who will conduct his own opera, studied orchestral conducting while at the Cleveland Institute. At Indiana, besides an outside field in piano performance, he had an additional outside field in political science. He is currently adjunct professor of music at Martin University in Indianapolis.

Pearson, the librettist, is a native of Indianapolis who holds degrees from Earlham College, Indiana University, and the University of California at Berkeley. He taught anthropology and linguistics at the University of South Carolina for 31 years before retiring to Bloomington. During his years in South Carolina, he taught college classes in the state prison and later worked as a volunteer teacher and counselor in the prison’s death row unit. He says the opera brings together his academic interest in anthropology and language along with his longstanding interest in drama and opera.

The stage director is Lesley Delk a Bloomington-based soprano currently enrolled in the doctoral program in operatic stage direction at the Jacobs School of Music.