Dessa Rose
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For her novel, Williams drew on the story of a female slave in Kentucky who in 1829 was sentenced to be hanged for leading an uprising on a coffle, a chain gang of slaves headed to market, but was spared until she could deliver her baby–a valuable asset, of course. Williams imagines that this woman escaped and met a white woman who turned her North Carolina farm into a sanctuary for runaway slaves in 1830, after her husband left her. The novelist not only indicts slavery (duh) but looks unblinkingly at the roots of America’s unease with interracial romance and at white writers’ tendency to speak for their black subjects. Like the novel, the musical includes a smug white journalist, Adam Nehemiah, who’s writing a book on slave rebellions and tries to make the imprisoned Dessa Rose talk by implying that her story will be forgotten unless she cooperates.
Perhaps “bloody tales are good for sales,” as Nehemiah says. But something of the novel’s waspishness is lost in translation to the stage even though Ahrens and Flaherty stick close to Williams’s story. This is the duo that won a Tony for the soaring score of Ragtime, Terrence McNally’s 1998 adaptation of E.L. Doctorow’s novel. And a few numbers here, like those in the earlier show, capture the injustice and suffering of a world in flux. But Dessa Rose is far more modest in terms of cast size and conception, which limits the songs’ impact, and the recitatives are somewhat monotonous in rhythm and tempo.
