“The Central Park Five”
Detroit Opera House
Detroit, Mich.
May 10, 2025
My chest felt heavy, bearing the weight of my blackness, as foreboding music began to fill the Detroit Opera House. I sat fidgeting in my seat as the fear channeled by the orchestra penetrated my bones. But by the second act of “The Central Park Five,” the fear was quelled and entangled with perplexion and frustration.
“The Central Park Five,” an opera about the now-exonerated Black and Latino boys who were wrongly imprisoned over a violent Central Park rape they did not commit in 1989, opened at the Detroit Opera House on Saturday, May 10. It will have two more performances in Detroit on Friday, May 16 and Sunday, May 18 with pre-performance talks with conductor Anthony Parnther and Dr. Naomi André.
Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise were all between 14 and 16 years old when they were arrested and convicted of raping a white jogger based on their false confessions to the crime. Even typing their names sends a shiver of dread through me that shakes the sadness in my ancestral memory. These young men were deemed guilty by a criminal justice system built on white supremacy in an infected society that sees Black and brown bodies as a threat.
Director Nataki Garrett talked about feeling like she was “predestined to become a statistic” before the show opened. Every African American has likely felt this stamp imposed upon them before. For me, it was when I lived in Tokyo and an innocuous booty call made me fear for my life. I waited outside my hookup’s apartment for him to open the gate in the dead of night. I was preoccupied by doom scrolling when a young Japanese woman who was taking out the trash stopped, paralyzed, when she saw me, as if I was a strange demon from another realm. Her fear was as palpable as mine when I sat in those opera seats.
She threw the garbage bag and scurried back into the building, reappearing with a man at least five times my size, who she had presumably summoned to protect her. As he hulked toward me with her cowering in his shadow, a series of thoughts flashed through my mind. Is this the moment I become the latest Black person to be killed for minding their business somewhere they “didn’t belong?” Am I about to become another hashtag because my simple presence signals “violent threat?” They don’t know that I’m a journalist, that I go to metal gigs on the weekends, that my mother is so worried about my safety in another country that she calls me on FaceTime everyday to make sure I’m still alive. And it doesn’t matter, because they see a Black body first and human being last. Add that to the list of ways a Black person can die — waiting to get laid while Black.
He stared menacingly into my soul, a look of confusion and concern, before finally throwing out the rest of the trash and walking away cautiously. When they went back into the gate, I heard my friend’s voice as he greeted them before finally letting me in. That night, I lay awake in his arms, shaken at the thought of how bad the encounter could have gone. I didn’t have the vocabulary in Japanese to explain to him what happened, or have faith that he would understand. So instead, the rise and fall of his warm chest provided a temporary solace and reminder of my humanity. His strong embrace reassured me that I was a woman who deserved to be protected, not an animal that scared Japanese women needed protection from.
“The Central Park Five” triggered me back to that moment — that feeling of helplessness knowing that if a grown man had decided to start a fight with me that resulted in my death, the media would somehow twist the story to make it seem like I deserved it.
But something about the opera felt amiss. It took me on a harrowing journey as Chaz’men Williams-Ali bared his soul as Raymond Santana, and Kendra F. Beasley’s grief-stricken performance as Yusef Salaam’s mother was as hauntingly beautiful as it was heartbreaking. Though I felt a well of sadness stirring in my gut, the show never fully took it to the boiling point. And for a person who cries a lot at the theatre, this was surprising.
It could have been because I was distracted by the incessant feedback coming from the left side of the opera house. Many annoyed patrons, myself included, craned their necks to investigate the endless buzzing, until it was finally resolved before act two. The ensemble of parents of the Central Park Five, as well as the boys themselves, had outstanding harmonization, but sometimes when just one person was singing, it was difficult to hear them. Catherine Martin’s singing as the Assistant District Attorney didn’t match the music — and the music was incredibly well done. Composer Anthony Davis funked up Parliament-Funkadelic’s “Give Up the Funk” to give us the five boys singing “We Are the Freaks.”
Todd Strange provided a caricature of President Donald Trump, a racist, entitled buffoon who inserted himself in a situation he had no business in, and never apologized for his full-page newspaper ads calling for the five boys to get the death penalty. It provided a bit of comic relief in the midst of the opera’s heaviness, even though Trump’s involvement in the case was anything but funny.
I urge the audience, however, to remember that these are actors. During the curtain call on opening night, the audience booed Martin and Strange as if spewing hate at the ADA and Trump themselves. This was unfair, and they should instead have been applauded for being so convincing.
Though it wasn’t perfect, “The Central Park Five” takes us on a tumultuous journey of grief. It’s as complicated as the emotion itself entangled in fear, disappointment, helplessness, anger, and love in an abstract package.
For more information, show times, and tickets, see detroitopera.org.
Published in partnership with Detroit Metro Times.
