'Central Park Five' opera – with Donald Trump as a character – to open in Detroit Detroit Free Press

Justin Hopkins (from left), Nathan Granner, David Morgans, Markel Reed and Chaz'men Williams-Ali rehearse a scene for the Detroit Opera's performances of Anthony Davis' opera The Central Park Five on May 10, 16 and 18.Austin T. Richey/Detroit Opera

Detroit Opera is presenting "The Central Park Five," an opera about the wrongful conviction of five teenagers.The opera includes Donald Trump as a character, highlighting his early political involvement in the case.The Detroit production comes at a time when arts funding is under threat and free speech is being challenged.Michigan has a high number of exonerations, emphasizing the relevance of the opera's theme of wrongful convictions.

Detroit Opera is going straight to the headlines for its latest subject. This weekend, the company will present “The Central Park Five,” composer Anthony Davis’ Pulitzer Prize-winning adaptation of the true story of systemic discrimination and racial injustice that forever altered the lives of five young men in late 1980s New York City.

Directed by Nataki Garrett, “The Central Park Five” follows the wrongful convictions of five African American and Latino teenagers in the assault of a white female jogger in Central Park. After serving their sentences, they were later exonerated through DNA evidence. Their story has been told in Ken Burns’ 2012 documentary “The Central Park Five” and Ava DuVernay’s 2019 Netflix miniseries “When They See Us.”

On Saturday, May 10, their story will be told at the Detroit Opera House, and along with the five main characters, audiences will also recognize another key figure in the opera: President Donald Trump.

In the roiling heat of the Central Park Five backlash in 1989, Trump – then a New York real estate mogul – placed full-page ads in New York City’s newspapers, calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty in New York and the execution of the five Black and Latino boys, despite no proof of their guilt.

The opera opens amid a raging storm in the American arts community, with the embattled President Trump slashing millions of dollars in critical arts funding. The show is also opening in a community where wrongful convictions are all too common and returning citizens account for a significant portion of the population.

“I lived in New York at the time when this happened,” said Davis, who also composed Detroit Opera's 2022 "X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X." “I was very aware of what was going on, and I felt it would be a wonderful challenge as an opera because you have five protagonists, which is an interesting challenge. And then, also, that was really the beginning of Donald Trump’s political career. I wanted to explore that and how racial animus can be exploited for political reasons. I was fascinated.

“The original libretto did not have Trump in it, but I felt it was very important to have him as a character in the opera, and also to have the assistant D.A., who was a woman, because I thought that was a really important aspect of the trial, too – it was almost as if they were pitting feminism against Black masculinity. I felt (all) this could be really great material for an opera.”

Director Garrett said the working process in Detroit has been “really beautiful,” despite the heavy subject matter.

“It’s a remount of an opera that I directed in Portland a few years back,” she explained, “and the great thing about the remount process is that you’ve already built the structure. And so most of it is about doing a more bespoke process for this particular group of humans, these artists who are a part of this, and also really thinking about what it means to do this in this time.”

'A danger to doing art like this'

The show’s Detroit opening comes at a time when art and free speech are under attack by the Trump administration and, in particular, on the heels of last week’s widespread termination of funding to arts organizations as President Trump moves to gut the National Endowment for the Arts.

Additionally, Trump himself is the subject of an open defamation lawsuit from the Five, for “false and defamatory statements” made in reference to them during a late 2024 presidential debate with Kamala Harris.

“We received an NEA grant of $40,000 to support our performances of the Pulitzer Prize-winning opera ‘The Central Park Five,’ by composer Anthony Davis and librettist Richard Wesley,” Detroit Opera told the Free Press in a written statement.

“We received a notice on Friday, May 2 informing us that our National Endowment for the Arts award has been terminated, effective May 31, 2025. We have received all of the funds and will have completed our project by May 31, 2025, so this does not impact us in the same way it does many of our colleagues around the country.”

Garrett currently serves as board chair for Theatre Communications Group, an umbrella organization that supports nonprofit theaters across the country.

“The devastation is real," Garrett said. "In any kind of authoritarian shift in a democratic government, one of the first things they do to signal what they’re activating is to restrict the voice of the artist, and the possibility for the artist to be able to continue to speak truth to power.

“I think there's danger to doing art like this in any time. I think that art that speaks truth to power has the distinctive possibility of igniting people's interest in understanding how the world really works, and wanting to activate themselves around supporting shift and justice. Any art worth its salt has the potential to to be impactful in that way.”

She pointed out that while the public may not realize it today, many classical operas were dangerous in their time, as well.

“But in this moment, right now, where there seems to be a level of retaliation against artists and artistic practice and organizations that really support the artist,” she said, “(it) really lets you know how important our work is, and how afraid of the artist this particular version of our government is. So, my thing is, you keep doing the work that you were called to do. Our job is to amplify our human condition, to reflect back to the world.

“Our artwork becomes the artifacts for future generations to have clarity and understanding about what happened during our time, and so you have to keep doing it. We know the treachery of a lot of historical moments simply because people made art about it. And so that’s what you do as an artist: You keep making art.”

Baritone Markel Reed, who portrays Five member Yusef Salaam in the production, said Detroit Opera has shielded the ensemble from any potential blowback.

“I would say the company has definitely protected us very well,” said Reed, “and we feel very safe and insulated from anything that may be circulating outside of here. We’re going to tell the stories because they should be told, to hopefully make sure that this kind of injustice doesn’t happen again, at least not like this. I feel honored to be able to tell the real story, to be someone that fights for justice (and) advocacy.”

Wrongful convictions in Michigan

Michigan has the fifth-highest number of exonerations since 1989, when DNA evidence was first used to secure an exoneration and changed the game in wrongful conviction cases since then, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.

Since that year, 183 people in Michigan have been exonerated. But these exonerees lost a total of 1,960 years of their lives — an average of nearly 11 years per person, according to the national registry.

As for the timing of the opera, Kenneth Nixon, a Detroit exoneree, said there’s never a bad time to expose the injustices of the criminal justice system. It’s necessary, Nixon said.

“It’s a great way to spread the word about how society has been misinformed about wrongful convictions,” Nixon said. “Having a visual, such as an opera or a stage play, that can really shed light in the form of art, I think it’s incredible … the true narrative behind the story, the honesty that comes with it, it’s a great way to inform society about the perils of our system,” like government and police misconduct.

“People don’t fully understand that you can just be going about your life and one day become a target of a bad police officer or a flawed investigation and literally lose your life,” he said.

“We’re being taught that the process is fair, when it’s really not.”

Nixon was wrongfully convicted in 2005 at age 19 of arson and murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole in connection with a Detroit house firebombing on Charleston Street that killed a 10-year-old boy and an infant. But in 2021, his innocence was proven, and he was freed following investigations by the Cooley Law School Innocence Project and the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office Conviction Integrity Unit.

There was no physical evidence linking Nixon to the crime, he had several alibi witnesses, and two memos were withheld from Nixon’s legal defense that would have helped prove his innocence. And his legal team says prosecutors also relied on a false jailhouse confession — the informant was given a reduced sentence and early release in his pending case in exchange for testimony claiming Nixon confessed to him.

Soon after Nixon was freed, he co-founded the Organization of Exonerees, an organization dedicated to advocating for the wrongfully convicted and changes in the criminal system that would prevent wrongful convictions. There are nearly 50 people in Michigan who were wrongfully convicted whom the organization has helped.

Recent exonerees who are among the organization include George and Melvin DeJesus — brothers from Pontiac who were freed in March 2022 after they spent 25 years in prison for a 1995 rape and murder they did not commit — and Marvin Cotton Jr., who was release from prison in 2020 after serving 19 years for murder he did not commit.

Nixon said every wrongful conviction unit in Michigan has a backlog of cases they are reviewing. “And when I say backlog, I mean upwards of several hundred,” Nixon said. “Who knows the true number of wrongfully convicted people who are still languishing in prison?”

The University of Michigan's Innocence Clinic, established in 2009, was the first non-DNA innocence clinic in the country.

Wayne County was the first in Michigan to establish a conviction integrity unit in 2017. The Michigan Attorney General's Office, Washtenaw County, Oakland County, and Macomb County have since followed suit.

Additionally, Wayne County has a large community of returning citizens. As of 2022, about 7,500 people return to Wayne County every year after incarceration — that's over a third of people paroled from Michigan prisons returning to the county, according to the State Bar of Michigan.

Centering the protagonists

For Garrett, keeping the five young men who were wrongly incarcerated at the heart of “The Central Park Five,” despite Trump’s specter hanging over, is key.

“Our current president,” she said, “before he became president, inserted himself into this story and, even more recently, continued to insert himself. Originally, Trump was not a part of this. It wasn’t somebody he knew. He wasn’t supporting a constituent, he wasn’t a politician. At the time, he decided to insert himself into this terrible ordeal that happened to these five boys and the victim of assault and he, in my opinion, took advantage of a very fragile situation by taking ads out in four New York newspapers to fan the flames against these boys who were being wrongly accused, coerced into confession.

“They never admitted wrongdoing. They pled not guilty, and then they served the time, even though they were wrongfully convicted and then exonerated. And then, what does he do? He decides to reamplify this story in the last presidential debate, so he continues to use the victimization of these humans to stoke his own fire and to give himself relevance. How I deal with it is I center the people who were actually harmed, these five men who were boys and their parents. That’s what Richard Wesley, the book writer, and Anthony Davis, the composer, constructed.”

Garrett referenced recent detentions and deportations happening locally and nationwide, also at the hands of the Trump regime.

“I think it’s relevant here and now,” she said, “as people are telling more stories about being held at the Canadian border, falsely held for days and weeks – that is incarceration. As long as we are a nation that wrongfully incarcerates humans – especially right now, with the cases in El Salvador without due process – as long as that is happening, these stories remain relevant. So I think it’s important to Detroit, but I think it’s important to our country, and I think it’s important to the world to continue to tell the stories that unfortunately reflect our reality as citizens.

“The work that these artists are doing in this room is tremendous, phenomenal. Anthony Parnther, the conductor, is leading the charge in making sure that this music that Anthony Davis composed is the most penetrating. Opera as a carrier for this story is an experience that is not to be missed.”

“The Central Park Five” opens Saturday, May 10, with additional performances on Friday, May 16, and Sunday, May 18, at the Detroit Opera House, 1526 Broadway St. Tickets start at $30 and can be purchased at detroitopera.org. Detroit Opera has also introduced new $25 rush tickets for city of Detroit residents, available by calling the box office at 313-237-7464 or visiting detroitopera.org/discounts.