By Janelle Gelfand / Enquirer staff writer

- Margaret Garner is having labor pains, and the hatching of this new opera is as nerve-wracking as a late night on a maternity ward.

Angela Brown (Cilla), Eric Greene (Robert Garner), Tracie Luck (Margaret Garner) (Michigan Opera Theater)

"Writing an opera is a collective birthing process," said composer Richard Danielpour at the Detroit Opera House on Sunday. "Every day we look at the sonogram in anticipation and terror. The most special thing about it - in all the changes and adjustments - is that we have become a family."

The opera, to have its Detroit premiere in May, followed by its Cincinnati premiere in July and Philadelphia in 2006, is based on a true story about Boone County slave Margaret Garner, who escaped to Cincinnati with her family and, as pursuers closed in, killed her child rather return her to slavery.

Margaret Garner's dream team - which includes Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison writing her first libretto - has struggled during the past three weeks with musical cuts and critical plot alterations.

The workshop, held before the opera's stakeholders at Detroit Opera House, culminated in performances last weekend that Cincinnati Opera artistic director Nicholas Muni equated to "part workshop - part preview."

On the Web

The team that is bringing Margaret Garner to the opera stage has launched www.MargaretGarner.org, a new online resource center about the production. The Web site has information on the opera's creative team and cast, the story, historical and educational resources and a photo gallery. There are also links to Web sites of the commissioning opera companies to purchase tickets. Margaret Garner will premiere May 7-22 at Michigan Opera Theatre in Detroit; at Cincinnati Opera July 14, 16 and 22; and at Opera Company of Philadelphia in February 2006. Cincinnati Opera's 2005 summer festival season will be announced later this month. Advance orders for Margaret Garner will be accepted beginning Oct. 1. Information: 241-2742; www.cincinnatiopera.com.

The atmosphere, Muni says, "goes back and forth between moments of tension, intense pressure and reflection."

But it was the musical cuts from three hours of music that Danielpour was finding painful - something he ironically likened to losing a child. It was so painful, he consulted his friend and Broadway and film composer Marvin Hamlisch, who flew in to Detroit for Sunday's run-through. Hamlisch reassured him by saying he'd had to slice two hours of music from A Chorus Line, and "if you only have to cut a half hour of music, you'll be OK."

"It's not easy for him," says maestro Stefan Lano, who will conduct the premiere. "But Richard is coming from the world of symphony. And now this is his trial-by-fire into the theater."

Two years in the writing and eight months from its premiere, Margaret Garner is at a critical junction. At stake is much more than the almost $5 million production cost, split between three companies (Michigan Opera Theatre, Cincinnati Opera and Opera Company of Philadelphia).

Changes made now will determine whether this is just another new opera that is quickly forgotten - or whether it becomes one of the most significant works ever to address the African-American experience.

"I think we're in a great place," says stage director Kenny Leon, who recently directed the Broadway revival of A Raisin in the Sun and is tackling his first opera. "There's a lot to be done, but not any more than for any project I'd be working on. I think we have the tools to create something really great and special."

Act 1

"O mother, O father, don't abandon me,

while my sweat still sweets the rich brown soil of dear old Kentucky." - Slave chorus, Act I, scene 2

It's Saturday at Detroit Opera House, where a cast of young singers - mostly understudies for the star-studded final cast - is about to read through Act 1 of the two-act opera. Danielpour, 48, is hunched over his score directly behind the conductor, his long black mane of hair hanging over his suit collar. Earlier, he appeared harried and preoccupied as he huddled with his creative team.

Conspicuously missing is the 73-year-old Morrison, called away to Europe but in constant touch by phone. The initial spark occurred between her and Danielpour over a New York lunch in 1996. Each had separately discovered the story of Garner, Morrison while researching her book, Beloved.

"It was serendipity. We were essentially pitching the same idea to each other," Danielpour told the Enquirer last year.

In the orchestra pit, Lano leads the Detroit Opera Orchestra, at first fine-tuning orchestral spots without the singers. It's the orchestra's only run-through before the opera goes into production in April.

Danielpour's lyrical score is a sophisticated, eclectic blend that blurs the line between opera and musical theater, often evoking Leonard Bernstein, gospel and spirituals. Lano skips around, choosing an earthy slave workers' chorus accompanied by bongos, and instructs his musicians to play "a bit broader, sassy, Duke Ellington."

Most of the opera's major stakeholders are in the house - the companies' three artistic directors, board members, sponsors and more than 40 people from the Cincinnati area, including scholars of the Margaret Garner story from Northern Kentucky University and members of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, which the Cincinnati premiere will honor.

Nearby is the director, Leon, leaning forward in his seat, hands under his chin, wearing a leather jacket, jeans and diamond stud earring. He suddenly leaps up, jumps onstage and whispers something in the ear of each singer.

"I just want to touch people - like when I worked with P. Diddy (Sean Combs) and Phylicia Rashad and Audra McDonald," Leon says later of his work on A Raisin in the Sun. "I'm a people person. I want to make people bigger; I want them to do their greatest work.

"What I said to them today is, 'You have to sell that moment (a joyous opening chorus). There's no payoff for the sad things unless you really get into it and clap your hands together. Be joyous. We haven't been getting that for the last two days. We need to hit it today.' "

The opera begins. We're thrust into a slave auction in 1856 Kentucky, with the scene of human beings being bought and sold, and families torn apart. A white chorus sings "How much?"

"Sleep in the meadow, sleep in the hay, Baby's gonna dream the night away. Lovely baby, pretty baby, Baby's gonna dream the night away." - Margaret's lullaby, Act 1

In a touching vignette, the slave Margaret Garner, her husband Robert and his mother Cilla, enclose the couple's baby in a warm embrace. It's a powerful moment that paints a picture of family love, destroyed shortly after by the farm's cruel overseer, Casey (sung by tenor Mark Panuccio, a Cincinnatian).

Getting through that moment is difficult, says Tracie Luck, the understudy for the title role that will be sung by opera diva Denyce Graves.

"It's finding the grace where you can still put the mask of the actor on, and convey the emotion without going through it every time."

Act 2

On Sunday in the Detroit Opera House, the opera is about to be heard for the first time in its entirety, with piano and singers but no orchestra. Lano conducts from the pit; Danielpour is seated near the front, flanked by his fiancee, Kathleen Sciaba, and Hamlisch, who has just arrived.

"I think it's wonderful to have this kind of a new opera," says Hamlisch. "They're still doing things to it, but I think right now they're really on a great track."

Act 1 goes without a hitch. The young family is ripped apart. Margaret is sent to live in the slave owner's mansion.

"Doing this opera for me is like going back in history and discovering what really happened," says Angela Brown, who will sing Cilla in Cincinnati and Philadelphia. (Jessye Norman will sing the role in Detroit.)

"I have to be the strong one, because I have gone through what Margaret is about to experience by going into the home of (slave owner) Edward Gaines. I am fearful for her, and for my son, who has been rented out and not knowing the things that he is going to endure."

"Ohio - It means 'beautiful.'"

"Is it? Is it beautiful?"

"So I hear. A beautiful place for a future." - Robert and Margaret Garner, Act 2

Reality operas

Other contemporary operas that are based on recent historical events: Amistad by Anthony Davis; about a 1839 successful uprising of African captives on a ship bound for America. 1997. The Death of Klinghoffer by John Adams; on the murder of an elderly American during a 1985 cruise-ship hijacking. 1991. Doctor Atomic by John Adams; about nuclear scientist Robert Oppenheimer. To premiere in 2005. Einstein on the Beach by Philip Glass. 1976. Harvey Milk by Stewart Wallace; on the murder of a gay activist San Francisco supervisor. 1995. Jackie O by Michael Daugherty (staged by Cincinnati Opera's Nicholas Muni). 1997. Jerry Springer, the Opera by Richard Thomas. 2003. Manifest Destiny by Keith Burstein; an al-Qaeda love story. 2004. The Mother of Us All by Virgil Thomson; the story of Susan B. Anthony. 1947. Nixon in China by John Adams; about U.S. President Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to Beijing. 1987. Sacco and Vanzetti by Anton Coppola; based on a true double murder and trial in Boston, 1920. 2001. X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X by Anthony Davis. 1986.

The performers sing their hearts out, but Act 2 is less polished. Margaret and her family have escaped to Ohio. But the gut-wrenching scene where she kills her children ended up on the cutting room floor two days earlier. The creators are still grappling with how she will do the deed. Also axed: other characters, scenes and two orchestral interludes. All this has left critical gaps in the libretto and musical score.

In 1856, the Cincinnati Enquirer's headline cried "Stampede of Slaves; A Tale of Horror ... A Negro Child's Throat Cut from Ear to Ear ..." The ensuing trial riveted the nation for a month. But the opera's courtroom scene - a moment of high drama, which determines whether Margaret should be tried for murder or for "destruction of property" - somehow falls flat. Some of the characters come across as stereotypes. Facts of the original story have been altered.

"We know historically that she kills her children to prevent them from being enslaved, but that's not made clear in the opera," says Dr. Delores Walters of NKU's Institute for Freedom Studies. "It's an important story and a compelling story, and one that should be told."

The Margaret Garner story is "what we believe to be the single greatest unhealed wound in this country's history," says Danielpour. "Are we there yet? No. We've made a conscious choice not to be literal storytellers, but to get to the heart and spirit in order to speak to the meaning we'd love to have from this endeavor."

Clearly it is still a work in progress. Nevertheless, Cincinnati Opera board member Dr. Robert Hasl of Westwood was impressed.

"Just as when I first became aware of Dead Man Walking, I knew we had a winner," Dr. Hasl says. "We have a winner. It's going to need some fine-tuning. But they're in this beautiful situation of having eight months between now and the opening."

As the creators left Detroit to hammer out revisions and rewrites, former federal judge Nathaniel Jones reflected on what he had seen.

"It was a powerful dramatization of that aspect of American history, and it has a lesson that contemporary people can learn from," he says. "That is the feeling of what freedom means, and the price that people will pay to preserve freedom, even if it means death."

For the excerpts from the libretto of Margaret Garner used in this story:

Copyright (c) 2005 by Associated Music Publishers, Inc. (BMI) International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission.