Performers and opera lovers see ‘The Central Park Five’ as a show of resistance against Trump

DETROIT (AP) — As Detroit Opera officials made plans last fall to bring a production based on the Central Park Five to their 2025 lineup, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump loomed large and just off stage.

The opera puts to music the story of five Black and Latino teens imprisoned for the 1989 rape and beating of a white woman in New York’s Central Park and prominently features Trump as a real estate showman calling for the death penalty in the case.

Booking the production reflected a modern commitment to adding diverse and contemporary stories to opera houses in Detroit and elsewhere in the U.S., stages where classic composers have long reigned.

But adding it to the calendar also forced officials to consider how Trump could react to the production if he won a second term as president, said Yuval Sharon, artistic director at the opera house.

“As soon as the election happened last November, we did think to ourselves, how can we best prepare our audience and prepare our community to know what they’re about to see when they come to the Detroit opera,” Sharon said.

In true theater fashion, they decided to let the show go on, unaware that audiences would take their seats as Trump pursues dramatic changes to the arts in the U.S.

He fired the Kennedy Center board, replaced them with loyalists and took over as board chair. He wrote on social media that members of the previous board “do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.”

Trump then took aim at the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities through proposed budget cuts. And earlier this month, he authorized a 100% tariff “on any and all” foreign-produced movies coming into the U.S.

“Muggers and murderers”

Debuting in 2019, “The Central Park Five” opera won the Pulitzer Prize for music the following year. It has also been performed in Portland, Oregon, and Long Beach, California. So far, no other performances are on its calendar.

At its heart are the events leading up to the arrests, convictions and imprisonment of Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise. The teens said their confessions to police were coerced.

To many, the five came to embody the damage caused by a racist belief in out-of-control crime perpetrated by youths of color. Trump added fuel with full-page ads in New York newspapers.

“I want to hate these muggers and murderers,” Trump wrote in an ad in Newsday. “They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.”

“It started with his demonizing five young boys, calling for the death penalty, and really exploiting the underlying racial animus that existed and racial anxiety in New York,” composer Anthony Davis said. “That’s become his playbook ever since, whether he’s demonizing immigrants or he’s demonizing trans people or he’s demonizing homosexuals or demonizing anyone that he can view as the other.”

The convictions of the five were vacated in 2002 after evidence linked a serial rapist to the crime. As president in 2019, Trump refused to apologize to the men, saying “they admitted their guilt.” The opera includes a performer portraying Trump.

“We didn’t make it more critical or less critical (of Trump),” Sharon said of the opera. “What they did with this piece is they took Trump’s own words and they set that to music. Ninety-five percent of the libretto is directly from the language that Trump used to insert himself in this story.”

Resistance by creating and performing

“The Central Park Five” played for three dates in May in Detroit and people associated with the production said they experienced no significant backlash. Some in the arts community said moving forward with the performance was a sign of resistance — a mirror of artists or productions backing out of performances at the Kennedy Center to protest Trump’s takeover.

“This is a stifling of the truth. This is a stifling of art,” performer Nathan Granner said of efforts to erase federal funding for arts programs.

Granner, 43, has portrayed Korey Wise since the opera’s launch. He says it did cross his mind with these performances whether opponents to the show could become violent.

“Is somebody going to come in and shoot up the building?” he said. “They did very well in hiring extra security. We always felt safe.”

With the performances done, Granner now wonders whether Trump’s approach to the arts will shape audience interest and reactions in productions and other creations that don’t fit with the president’s idea of fine art.

“With the way the political climate is, I don’t really foresee (another performance of “The Central Park Five” opera) in the states in the next few years,” Granner said, adding that if the opportunity arises, he would reprise the role of Wise.