The New York premiere of the opera “An American Soldier,” based on the story of Pvt. Danny Chen, opens at the Perelman Performing Arts Center on Sunday.
Chen was born and raised in Manhattan’s Chinatown and joined the Army in 2011. His body was discovered with a self-inflicted gunshot wound on a U.S. base in Afghanistan later that year. A military investigation revealed that the 19 year-old had been subjected to brutal hazing and racist abuse by his fellow soldiers. A series of courts martial followed.
But “An American Soldier” isn’t a simple retelling of the news. Playwright David Henry Hwang, best known for “M. Butterfly,” felt the story was so unambiguous that it would not make for a good theater piece.
He said opera offered other possibilities.
“Opera inherently is bigger than life,” he said. “If only because we don’t go through life singing all the time. So the audience comes in expecting to suspend their disbelief, and therefore [this] kind of big, epic, emotional story works well in opera.”
Hwang knew that the composer Huang Ruo had been commissioned by Washington National Opera to write “an American opera,” and was looking for a subject. The two decided to collaborate on “An American Soldier.”
In Hwang’s reimagining of the story, Danny Chen’s ghost is watching over the court martial of the sergeant accused of hazing him to death.
“An American Soldier” layers the real and the surreal, and Hwang’s text, or libretto, follows a story proposed by Huang Ruo, who wanted the mother and son relationship to form the opera’s “backbone.”
Huang Ruo acknowledged that the story focused on what happened to Danny Chen.
“Mother Chen, Danny’s mom, is a first-generation immigrant from China,” said the composer. “And her American dream is very different from Danny’s American dream.”
Danny Chen grew up in Chinatown with his parents, who don’t speak English, and his cousin Banny Chen, who now acts as spokesperson for the family.
Banny said the decision to go beyond the trial’s grim reality has offered the family an unexpected sense of closure.
“We never really knew what it would have been like if Danny came back,” he said. “Which is usually stuff you see in social media, a really happy, momentous occasion – the military man coming back. That’s something that we never received.”
But seeing Danny’s ghost on stage gave the family some sense of what he might have said, according to Banny.
“It’s something that we never imagined and yet this opera puts it right in front of us,” said Banny. “That’s something that the family never really asked for but it’s something we really appreciated.”
The team behind “An American Soldier” refers to the piece as “opera theater,” because the soldiers’ testimonies in court are spoken rather than sung.
Huang Ruo said those scenes are closer to theater. But opera offered the possibility of poetic touches, like the character named Josephine, a high school friend of Danny’s.
In one eerily beautiful scene, Danny and Josephine, who are on opposite sides of the world, simultaneously sing a song to the moon.
The composer said that this was inspired by an old Chinese expression: “The moon is bigger and brighter back home.”
The real court martial of the sergeant who led the hazing ended with him being convicted of a lesser charge. But the opera concludes instead with a haunting scene, which David Henry Hwang refers to as “a kind of surrealistic lullaby that Mother Chen is singing to the ghost of her son. The end of the opera is the only time that the mother can see the spirit of the son.”
The opera’s title refers to Pvt. Danny Chen, an American soldier. But for David Henry Hwang, it also has a deeper meaning.
“I think that opera asks a lot of questions about what it means to be an American. Whose Americanness is taken for granted? And who has to prove their Americanness over and over again? As we see in this story, and as we’ve seen subsequently during the pandemic and the spike of anti-Asian racism and attacks, for so many Asian-Americans, our Americanness is provisional and can be withdrawn at any time.”
Or as Banny Chen put it, “Danny and I, we grew up considering ourselves as regular American boys. We never really had to put ourselves outside a box and say like, oh, we are Asian American. So when Danny enlisted in the military, he was just serving his own country. And unfortunately, people saw him differently.”
An American Soldier opens on Sunday at PAC NYC and runs through May 19.