Sister Helen Prejean remembers the hour on April 5, 1984, when she watched Patrick Sonnier die in the electric chair in Louisiana's Angola State Prison.

A cellblock scene from the San Francisco Opera production of Dead Man Walking. (San Francisco Opera photos) | ZOOM |

        “You're in this fire when you're with someone who's about to be killed,” she says, in a whisper. “You know what you've got to do, and who you need to be.

        “It was my first execution; for a week I took sleeping pills and drank hot milk so I wouldn't dream about these images. A strength comes up inside of you.”

        When she wrote her book in 1993, Dead Man Walking (Random House; $13 paperback) chronicling her experiences as spiritual adviser to death row inmates, she never guessed it would be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, spend 31 weeks at No. 1 on the New York Times Best Seller List and be made into an Academy Award-winning film starring Susan Sarandon, who won the Oscar for best actress. In 2000, it became an opera.

MORE ONLINE

• Join us for a Web chat with Sister Helen Prejean 12:30-1 p.m. Friday at Cincinnati.Com.   • Read the transcript of the June 28 chat with Leonard Foglia, who is directing the Cincinnati production of Dead Man Walking at Cincinnati.Com.   • For information about Sisters of St. Joseph of Medaille, visit www.csjmedaille.org.

        A new production of the opera Dead Man Walking, by Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally, will receive its Midwest premiere Thursday in Music Hall.

        The opera recounts the experiences of a Louisiana nun who becomes the spiritual adviser to death row inmate Joseph De Rocher. Their relationship evolves into friendship as they discover how spiritual redemption can be achieved through love and forgiveness.

        “All this was conceived in fire, you understand, because I watched a man being killed in front of my eyes,” Sister Helen says simply, in her Louisiana drawl. “Then I got involved in victims' families, and got plunged into their suffering. I wanted to tell the story of my own journey.”

She wears a suit

        Sister Helen, 64, bears little resemblance to her cinematic alter-ego, Susan Sarandon. She is petite, feisty and grandmotherly, with salt-and-pepper hair and non-descript colored eyes behind large-rimmed glasses. She wears a no-nonsense suit; not a habit. As she talks animatedly about her work, her face radiates warmth and deep inner conviction.

Frederica von Stade (left) and John Packard protray Joseph de Richer and his mother. | ZOOM |

        She's an outspoken critic of capital punishment and the legal system. Perhaps more than any author in the country, Sister Helen has kept capital punishment in the public eye.

        What most people don't know is that she is also adamant about victims' rights, and has counseled victims' families — a road that is equally painful and not always successful, she admits.

        “I made mistakes, you know. I didn't touch the victims' families (at first),” she says. “I've accompanied five people to death, and only one of those victims' families has befriended me. All the rest almost always see me as an enemy. ... But I always offer, because I learned that I couldn't not offer,” she says.

        She is so down-to-earth — “I'm the every-nun,” she says with a twinkle — it isn't long before you're hanging on every word.

        “I would have never started working on death row, if I had not worked with poor people,” she begins.

        She is a member of the Cincinnati-based Sisters of St. Joseph of Medaille, an order dedicated to helping the poor and suffering. Her first experiences with poor people were in Cincinnati, including the Drop-In Center, Over-the-Rhine, before she moved back to her home state, Louisiana.

        She had no idea what she was getting into when she became pen pals with a convict on death row, and agreed to be his spiritual adviser.

        “I didn't know what I was doing there. We hadn't executed anybody (in Louisiana) since the '60s. I never dreamed they were gonna kill this guy,” she says over an early spring lunch in Nicola's, Over-the-Rhine. “I meet him — and I'm blown away by his humanness! What did I think — was he going to be a monster?

        “Then it was like descending into the story, and the crime. The minute I knew the crime, that (Mr. Sonnier and his brother) had killed two teenage kids — you know what a riptide is? Boy that was a riptide. Because you're always there, on both sides.”

        “The fact that Dead Man Walking has had ardent vocal champions and people dead set against it — I haven't seen anyone in the middle,” says the opera's composer Jake Heggie. “To me, that means the piece strikes a nerve.”

Her story resonates

        Indeed, Sister Helen's story has struck a national nerve. Capital punishment is a wrenching emotional, political and religious issue that divides the country — and even families. Just recently, during two weeks in June, the U.S. Supreme Court made two major death penalty rulings, throwing into doubt the death sentences of nearly 700 convicted killers.

        The death penalty is a pendulum that swings, says Martin Pinales, an officer of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and a partner in the Cincinnati firm Sirkin, Pinales, Mezibov and Schwartz.

        “The death penalty is in the public consciousness now, and the opera is just one more factor,” he says. “We went through a period of death penalty, then no death penalty (after a 1972 Supreme Court ruling, Furman v. Georgia) and we are now in a period of death penalty. ... I think part of the problem with the death penalty is, how do you teach people not to kill people? By killing people?”

Not an opera buff

IF YOU GO

• What: Cincinnati Opera, Dead Man Walking by Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally, after the book by Sister Helen Prejean.   Leonard Foglia, director; Stefan Lano, conductor; Margaret Jane Wray (Sister Helen); Frederica von Stade (Mrs. Patrick de Rocher); John Packard (Joseph de Rocher); Measha Brueggergosman (Sister Rose); Kenneth Garrison (Father Grenville); William Powers (prison warden); Susan Nicely (Jade Boucher); Daniel Weeks (Howard Boucher); Karen Anderson (Kitty Hart); Robert Orth (Owen Hart).   • When: 8 p.m. Thursday, Saturday and July 19   • Where: Music Hall   • Tickets: $14-$110; 241-2742 or cincinnatiopera.com   • Read the review: Saturday on enquirer.com; Sunday in Tempo.   • There's more: The opera is a co-production of Opera Pacific, Cincinnati Opera, New York City Opera, Austin Lyric Opera, Michigan Opera Theatre, Pittsburgh Opera and Baltimore Opera.

        Capital punishment was the last thing on the minds of Mr. Heggie and Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist Mr. McNally, when they met in 1996 to discuss writing an opera. It was to be a comedy.

        Nothing clicked, and the idea was dropped. But a year later, when the two met again in San Francisco, Mr. McNally brought a list of ideas.

        “The first idea was Dead Man Walking,” Mr. Heggie recalls. “I just remember getting chills. It was the last thing I would have ever expected, but it immediately struck me as an incredibly brilliant idea.

        “I started thinking musically about how that would make sense on the opera stage — while he was reading the list. I don't, to this day, remember a single other idea he read.”

        Just before the commissioning company, San Francisco Opera, announced the project in 1998, Mr. Heggie got a call from Sister Helen.

        “She said, 'Jake, this is Sista' Helen,' ” he says, mimicking her Southern accent. “ 'San Francisco Opera wants to make an opera outta Dead Man Walking. Jake, I don't know boo-scat about opera, so you're gonna have to teach me.' ”

        Not an opera buff — she's seen three operas in her life: Aida, La Boheme and Dead Man Walking — Sister Helen wondered how this story would metamorphose into an opera. Mr. Heggie played her musical snippets over the phone as he wrote. She asked him once, “Are you going to write that atonal stuff? Are we gonna have tunes that people can hum?”

        She calls the gestation of the opera “seamless,” and gave the creators complete artistic freedom.

        “I told them, you get redemption as the central theme in this, and I trust you,” she says.

Sister's personal journey

        The music was one thing. But how to handle issues of crime and punishment was more daunting. The creators did not want to write a documentary, a remake of the movie or a biography of Sister Helen. They decided to frame it as Sister Helen's personal journey, and let opera goers come away with their own impressions.

        Sister Helen knew the challenge.

        “There is a deep ambivalence between life and death, compassion and revenge; it's in all of us,” she says.

        Indeed, it is the personal angle of her book — interwoven with detailed information about the death penalty — that provides its power. The movie added visual impact. The opera, she says, takes people emotionally to another place.

        The opera character, Joseph de Rocher (Sean Penn in the film) is a composite of two real life convicts — Patrick Sonnier and Robert Lee Willie — from the book.

        “In the prologue, everybody witnesses a crime,” she says. “So the starting point is outrage. ... Then the journey begins for the audience, because they see the crime, they meet him, they hate him, and they want to see him get it. It becomes the audience's journey as well.

        “By the time you get to the execution — no music, just the sounds of the machines and his heartbeat, all people can hear is their blood rushing in their own ears, and their own heartbeat.”

        The initial rape and murder scene will be graphic, says director Leonard Foglia, who is directing the Cincinnati production.

        “I don't think anyone will walk out. But we don't shy away from it,” he says. “It's very important right up front that we understand the severity of the crime.”

Sorrow and tragedy

        Even though Sister Helen's sympathies are drawn to the killer and the “injustice” of capital punishment, her book, the film and the opera do not deny the heinous nature of the crime, nor ignore the victims' families who have suffered unspeakable horrors.

        “They are in realms of sorrow and tragedy that I haven't tasted,” Sister Helen admits. “The prophet Jeremiah in the Old Testament has the image of the incurable wound. It has that aspect.”

        Debbie Morris, a former resident of Union, Ky., was a victim who survived the ravages of Mr. Willie when she was 16, and testified against him in his murder trial. She resented Sister Helen — until she met her after seeing the film. Her nightmares evolved into forgiveness, a journey she tells in her book, Forgiving the Dead Man Walking (Zondervan; $19.99).

        “I had a lot of conflict about knowing someone was about to die, and that I had had a role in it. At the same time, I can honestly say the thought of him dying did give me some relief. When I knew he was dead, I felt safer,” Mrs. Morris told the Enquirer in 1998.

        Sister Helen never expected to be thrust into the trauma of death row. She grew up in Baton Rouge the daughter of a lawyer, attended private schools and had vacationed in Europe by the time she was 15.

        When she began her descent into the United States penal system, she assumed that criminals had adequate representation — if not a Johnny Cochran dream team, she says. She was shocked to learn that Mr. Sonnier met with his lawyer a total of one hour before his trial.

        Today, she is writing another book, this one about the innocent on death row.

        “My big agenda — let 'em be mad at me for the right reason — I'm talking about life and not death,” she says.

        “I'm just one ordinary person, and I got thrown into it. Maybe God does take the weak things in the world to confound the strong. I'm still making the journey.”

        Sister Helen Prejean speaks on . . .

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