PAC NYC Debuts With Opera About America’s Mass Shootings, Racial Strife
Brand-new Watch Night takes on a lot as the first production at just-opened Perelman Performing Arts Center at New York’s World Trade Center.
(From left) Bill T. Jones, Tamar-kali, Lauren Whitehead and Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Watch Night‘s creative team.
Photographer: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman
Watch Night may be billed as an opera, but to librettist Marc Bamuthi Joseph, that’s the tip of the iceberg. “I describe it as an opera and a poetry reading having a bar fight in a church about American race,” Joseph says. Watch Night started duking it out on Nov. 3, when previews began at the Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC NYC) in lower Manhattan. The show opens on Wednesday, Nov. 8, and runs through Nov. 18.
Directed by Bill T. Jones, a two-time Tony award winner and “co-conceiver” of the piece,Watch Night follows two religious communities in the American South, a synagogue and a Black church, after both places of worship are viciously attacked in hate crimes. The story was inspired by mass shootings at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015 and at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018.