While Lincoln Lay Dying

Opera

Political rivalries, civil unrest, war, and the lives that would hang in the balance in While Lincoln Lay Dying. This story weaves together the intense events and actions of Abraham Lincoln and his political equal and rival, Secretary of Treasury Salmon P. Chase, and exposes how their decisions would impact the newly freed Black American community of Mitchelville, South Carolina. Through narration and music based on the historical collections of the Union League of Philadelphia, The Rosenbach Museum, and Mitchelville Freedom Park, it explores what freedom without equality did then, and does now, to undermine our society. It will focus light on a family’s struggle to survive the new freedoms during and after the Civil War and will seek to raise questions of how we can use individual and governmental powers to make our country truly free for all people. 

Leesburg 15

Opera

A peaceful protest ends in a lifelong struggle for human rights in Leesburg 15. Leesburg 15 is the little known true story of human perseverance in the face of an evil systematic racism designed to keep the innocent in chains. In the heat of the Georgian Summer with improper food and water, an overflowing toilet, and nothing to rest their heads upon, 15 black teenage American girls were wrongfully detained for peacefully protesting and subjected to brutality at the hand of the local government of Americus, Georgia. Their only salvation, a young photographer committed to finding and exposing injustices.