Alumni Spotlight
Bruce Pearson '53
Music on Death Row
Bruce Pearson '53
After decades of working to end the death penalty, Bruce L. Pearson '53, has turned his experiences into art. Pearson, of Bloomington, Indiana, will see his one-act opera performed this fall.
The opera, Small Box, explores the reactions among the prisoners and guards on death row when an inmate receives his execution date. Benny Wallace, the inmate, has been condemned because of his involvement in a robbery which turned bloody.
"I think that Bruce has done something rather interesting with the libretto. It's not a piece that lectures at you very strongly," says Lesley Delk, a fellow Quaker and the stage director for the opera. The show will be performed on November 7th at the annual meeting of the Indiana Information Center on the Abolition of Capital Punishment, for which Pearson is a volunteer and his wife Julia is treasurer.
A lifelong theater buff, Pearson started writing the libretto in 2007. After finishing it, he searched for someone to write music for it online, and eventually connected with Herman Whitfield III, an award-winning composer who teaches music at Martin University in Indianapolis.
Whitfield said the social relevance of the libretto appealed to him. He hopes the opera will accomplish what the arts do best; get audience members thinking and feeling. "I hope they come away with, if not an altered perspective, at least a broadened perspective," he says.
Small BoxSmall Box is meant to be accompanied by two other short operas, one about life in a Japanese internment camp during World War II, and the other a lighthearted romp set in Hawaii. If Small Box is a success, Pearson has hopes to have music written for the other two pieces so the whole set can be performed in an evening of opera. Small Box will be performed at 7 p.m. on Saturday, November 7 at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater in Bloomington. Tickets cost $15 ($10 for students with ID and for seniors.) Contact the box office at (812) 323-3020 or tickets@buskirkchumley.org. |
ON WITH THE SHOW
An early rehearsal took place in a large church downtown. The singers' tremendous voices set against the stained glass of the sanctuary gave the music a sacred tone, though the language and content came from the gritty vernacular of prison. Whitfield coached the performers on their style while Pearson offered social context.
"Do we all have southern accents, necessarily?" asked W. Jermaine Jackson, a tenor. Pearson said no; though Small Box is set in the fictional "South Kentexiana," the residents could have been born anywhere. The speech of inmates and guards wouldn't necessarily be distinct, he added, because the two groups typically come from similar backgrounds.
"It's definitely off the beaten path as far as opera plots go … [The show] has its moments of melodrama, but it's a lot more of a character study than a plot-driven piece," said singer Carl Kanowsky in an interview. While Kanowsky never believed in capital punishment, the opera has deepened his understanding of what occurs behind the scenes on death row.
Kanowsky's character, a janitor named Ragtail, knows firsthand that justice is not always served by the legal system. He is a murderer who will live out his natural life in prison, thanks to a bureaucratic snafu. "The character is very cynical and has the air that he's seen it all before," Kanowsky said.
LEARNING IN PRISON
The characters in Small Box are based on real people Pearson met while volunteering behind bars. He taught his first prison course in the mid-seventies while employed as an anthropology professor at the University of South Carolina. "This was at a time when South Carolina had a surprisingly liberal prison administration. I mean, think of that; college classes in a prison," he says.
Pearson began to realize that death row inmates' situations were rarely as simple as their sentences. Take the case of Dana Weldon, a 50-year-old man whom the Pearsons formally adopted a few years ago. Weldon was in his early twenties when he participated in a carjacking. Weldon's friend taped the driver's mouth shut to keep her quiet, and she suffocated.
Weldon's accomplice was executed, while he was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 20 years. He attended Pearson's classes, and the two became friends. The Pearsons adopted him to raise his chances of being released, and they return to South Carolina for his parole hearings. "It's not child's play, but Dana is a very different person now. He's a lot more serious. He would be the first to say that he was a stupid idiot at the age of 20, or whatever it was," Pearson says.
Pearson believes that many killings happen in the heat of the moment, and that their perpetrators are often more easily rehabilitated than people who commit more profitable crimes. Many inmates he's encountered are "just ordinary guys who decided to take a shortcut somewhere along the line."
QUAKER COMMITMENTS
Abolishing the death penalty is very much in line with Pearson's Quaker beliefs. "If you don't think it's a good idea to kill people in wartime, it's not a good idea to kill people, period," he said. Pearson believes guns should be difficult to obtain, and society should make more of an effort to teach people to regulate their emotions.
"Guns are such easy weapons to use thoughtlessly, and before you know it, you've killed somebody," he says.
Pearson's passion for social justice was sparked at Earlham, where he encountered Quakerism and explored the implications of the peace testimony. "In terms of developing a social conscience, it was really crucial," he says. He has fond memories of time spent with Quaker professors, eating dinner at their homes and observing how Quakerism shaped their lives.
The Pearsons are enjoying their retirement in Bloomington. Between them they have four children and six grandchildren. They are active members of Bloomington Friends Monthly Meeting, and Bruce teaches classes at the Monroe County Jail.
—Laura Gleason '08
Laura Gleason is a freelance writer based in Bloomington, Ind.
(Posted October 27, 2009)
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Page updated: October 27, 2009