AMERICAN APOLLO

PRODUCTION

Conductor DAVID NEELY Stage Director KIMILLE HOWARD * Video/Projection Design DAVID MURAKAMI * Scenic Design CALVIN STARA * Lighting Design BRIDGET S. WILLIAMS Costume Design HARRY NADAL * Make-Up/Hair Design KELLEN M. EASON * Associate Conductor DONALD LEE III * Musical Preparation TESSA HARTLE Stage Manager CARMEN CATHERINE ALFARO *

CAST in order of vocal appearance John Singer Sargent THOMAS GLENN * Thomas McKeller JUSTIN AUSTIN * Isabella Stewart Gardner MARY DUNLEAVY * Jimmy JASON ZACHER ‡

* DMMO mainstage debut ‡ Current DMMO Apprentice Artist

July 20 7:30 PM July 21 2:00 PM July 23 2:00 PM

Music by DAMIEN GETER Libretto by LILA PALMER

First performance: Washington, D.C.; Washington National Opera, April 2021 Company Premiere. Performed in English In partnership with the Pyramid Theatre Company and Des Moines Art Center Leadership funding provided by Harry Bookey and Pamela Bass-Bookey

JUSTIN AUSTIN

THOMAS GLENN

MARY DUNLEAVY

JASON ZACHER

DIRECTOR'S NOTES by Kimille Howard, Stage Director

We are in an amazing and urgent time of reckoning where complicated and dark truths about the past are beginning to receive recognition, especially through the arts. Those who are a part of exposing these truths get to be like pioneers digging into the other side of a well known facet of history and crafting the way it’s disseminated to the people.

Thomas Mckeller’s story has been buried behind the fame of John Singer Sargent’s artwork for nearly a century, and it is such an honor to be a part of undoing that erasure through American Apollo. This extraordinary opera sheds light on the life and impact of the Black elevator operator-turned-artists’ model and the lasting effect he had on Sargent as well as Isabella Stewart Gardner. We are opening the door to explore what a day in the life of this man was like as he interacted with the man who viewed his body as a template to represent the gods, but couldn’t—or wouldn’t—give him the public recognition he deserved.

I’m excited for audiences to experience Damien Geter’s evocative music and Lila Palmer’s powerful words as they weave an unfortunately familiar tale about the use of a Black body for personal gain. Despite McKellar’s circumstances, American Apollo serves as an acknowledgement and celebration of his lasting contribution to art history. Even if it is posthumous, we see him now.

Boston’s

Apollo BY NATHANIEL SILVER

IN FEBRUARY 2017, digging through a storage cabinet in search of a set of Whistler etchings, I came across a large portfolio. Contained inside were ten stunningly beautiful large-format works on paper signed by John Singer Sargent. The nine charcoal drawings and one collotype depicted bodies in whole and part, both women and a man. He stood out.

African American, athletic and nude, his remarkable physique and thoughtful, pensive expression—when visible—practically jumped off the page. Thomas McKeller was his name, as I soon found out. I also discovered that all of the drawings, most of which had never been displayed and none of which were known even to specialists, were studies for the cycle of murals executed over nearly a decade by Sargent at the Museum of Fine Arts.

Let me be clear. I use the word “discover” only in the sense of a personal epiphany. Neither the portfolio nor the man’s name or his role in the murals was in any sense my own discovery. All the Gardner Museum’s works on paper had been catalogued in 1968 by Rollin Van N. Hadley, these among them. Over 200 other drawings distributed across the Eastern Seaboard in museum collections from Amherst to Washington, D.C.—many recently digitized and accessible online—further attested to the extent of this model’s participation. McKeller’s name has formed part of the art historical record since at least 1956 when David McKibbin organized the exhibition Sargent’s Boston, and that information had even made it into the press. And none of this would have been news to Sargent’s contemporaries. Not only had friends and colleagues met McKeller in the painter’s studio, but a tribute newspaper article commemorating Sargent’s death in 1925 described the model’s pivotal role in the murals, albeit anonymously.

While the sitters of many of Sargent’s portraits have been the subject of essays, articles and even entire books, comparatively little ink has been spilled on the lives of his models. No one had addressed Thomas McKeller’s life in any depth. A sitter pays for a portrait to perpetuate his or her memory for posterity, and a model is paid to perform his or her job in relative anonymity but that one is as worthy of study as the other is a fact only recently acknowledged in exhibitions and accompanying scholarship.

I wanted to know more about Thomas McKeller, and I felt that our visitors would too. Who was this man? How long did he work with Sargent? On other projects too? Did he know Isabella Stewart Gardner? And what became of McKeller after both died? Every time I visited the Museum of Fine Arts murals and gazed at the MFA’s magnificent sketches for them displayed on the walls beneath Sargent’s rotunda, I was reminded of how much we did not know.

Over the next two years, I discovered how difficult it is to piece together from the archives a life simply lived. Thomas McKeller (1890–1962), a Black elevator operator, WWI veteran, and artist’s model, bore witness to some of the most brutal events in America’s history. As a child, he experienced a massacre of the Black citizens of his hometown Wilmington, N.C., and the subsequent introduction of Jim Crow segregation laws and never lived to see their abolition. As a teenager he joined the Great Migration, arriving in Boston and finding employment at the Hotel Vendome, where a chance encounter brought him face-to-face with painter John Singer Sargent (1856–1925).

McKeller subsequently became Sargent’s principal model in this country. Two murals—at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Harvard University—as well as drawings and a full-length nude painting memorialize nearly a decade of work in the artist’s studio, where Sargent transformed McKeller into deities, allegories and soldiers, and from individualized to classicizing, male to female, and black to white.

Nathaniel Silver is the William and Lia Poorvu Curator of Collections, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, Mass.

Our 2022 collaboration includes a performance of the current 20-minute version of the opera, a presentation by Dr. Nathaniel Silver, a discussion with the opera’s creative team lead by DMMO Scholar-In-Residence Dr. Naomi André, and a post-show reception generously sponsored by Fredrikson & Byron on Wednesday, July 20. DMMO is excited to invest in the expansion of this new work—with the evening-length production debuting as a part of our 2024 season.