On Apple Street in Homewood stands a Victorian mansion that was the first home of the National Negro Opera Company. Now under renovation after years of decay, it’s among the last — and certainly the largest — tangible piece of the legacy of the company’s pathbreaking founder, Mary Cardwell Dawson.
But Dawson’s work also lives on in other ways — including, appropriately enough, in performance halls. Starting Saturday, Pittsburgh Opera will stage the local premiere of “The Passion of Mary Cardwell Dawson,” a play with music that recalls the struggles its protagonist faced to give Black artists a chance to perform grand opera.
“I wanted to show that Mary Cardwell Dawson wanted to be defined not just by racism, but also to live a life fully and dedicated to her art,” said Sandra Seaton, the work's Michigan-based playwright, with composer Carlos Simon supplying original music.
As Dawson, the production stars Alyson Cambridge, an acclaimed soprano with a long resume of roles at the Metropolitan Opera, overseas and around the U.S. The rare non-operatic production by Pittsburgh Opera gets four performances at the Byham Theater, on Sat., April 27, Tue., April 30, May 3 and May 5.
While Dawson’s was not the nation’s first Black-run opera company, it was likely the most ambitious. Yet in Pittsburgh as elsewhere, her name is not widely known. Indeed, Cambridge herself said she’d never heard of Dawson until she was asked to portray her in a 2022 production at New York’s Glimmerglass opera festival, where the play had premiered a year earlier.
“I could not believe I did not know that there was this Black woman that founded the National Negro Opera Company and that she had such a huge impact on opening the doors for singers of color,” she said.
"We can't ever forget"
The one-act play portrays a single day in Dawson’s life, in 1943, the year after she and her husband, an electrician, left Pittsburgh for Washington, D.C., so he could find work.
Dawson’s troupe often performed outdoors, on a floating stage in the Potomac River, to circumvent the city’s segregated theaters. But after “La Traviata” was rained out, the company, short of cash and fighting with a labor union over placement on its “unfair” list, looks for a theater to host that evening’s performance of “Carmen.” But when the theater won’t change its segregated seating policy, Dawson is forced to choose between compromising her principles and risking another financially ruinous rainout.
“Can’t we just try to survive?” pleads one of her singers, a tenor named Frank (played by Christian Mark Gibbs). “Go to the hall for one night to sing? Forget all the battles?"
“We can’t ever forget, my boy!” responds Dawson.
Meanwhile, the singer cast as Carmen, named Phoebe (Jazmine Olwalia), seems overwhelmed. Dawson’s pep talks — “You’re not a follower, you’re a leader. ... You must be tough. Strong! Put on your armor!” — suggest a parallel between that opera’s protagonist and Dawson herself.
“She has passion and fire and goes against the grain, which is exactly what Mary Cardwell Dawson did,” said Kimille Howard, the Metropolitan Opera assistant stage director who is directing the show — just as she’s directed all four prior productions, including two at Glimmerglass and one at Washington National Opera.
Meroë Khalia Adeeb completes the cast as the singer Isabelle, with music director Marvin Mills serving as the onstage piano accompanist.
"A national statement"
Mary Lucinda Cardwell was born in North Carolina in 1894 but came to Pittsburgh as a child with her family. They lived in Homestead and Munhall, where young Mary participated in the choir at Park Place African Methodist Episcopal Church. In the 1920s, she studied at the New England Conservatory of Music, the only Black student in her class; she returned to Pittsburgh with her new husband, Walter Dawson, and founded the Cardwell Dawson School of Music, eventually based in that house on Apple Street.
The school ran for years, providing instrumental and voice lessons and more. Her most famous student was likely the child pianist who went on to become jazz legend Ahmad Jamal. Her Cardwell Dawson Choir performed at both the Chicago and New York World’s Fairs.
Drawing on the growing pool of classically trained Black performers, Dawson founded the National Negro Opera Company in 1941. While there had been other Black-run companies — the Theodore Drury Grand Opera Company gave its first performance in 1900, in New York City — opportunities for Black singers remained scarce. Just two years earlier, in 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution had denied legendary Black soprano Marian Anderson a concert at D.C.’s Constitution Hall; leading to her famed Easter Sunday concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Music scholar Karen Bryan, who is writing a biography of Dawson, said the NNOC was the first Black troupe to attempt a national reach.
“It was a much broader scope than any of the other companies had done,” Bryan said. “She just felt that it was important to make a national statement as much as possible.”
In all, Dawson would give work to some 1,800 singers, said Bryan, including such names as Robert McFerrin (father of jazz singer Bobby McFerrin), Lilian Evanti, La Julia Rhea, Carol Brice and Minto Cato. And many of those jobs came years before Anderson — a contemporary of Dawson’s — became the first Black singer to perform at the Met, in 1955, and even longer before Leontyne Price became the first Black singer to be a leading performer there, in 1961. (The New York City Opera began featuring Black singers in leading roles in the mid-’40s.)
As for the Apple Street house, renovations are underway thanks to local nonprofit National Opera House. The group’s founder and executive director, Jonnet Solomon, bought the building in 2000. Ground was broken in 2022, and the structure is now stabilized. The group has begun the effort to raise $10 million to restore the building as an arts center.
Solomon has seen “The Passion of Mary Cardwell Dawson” several times.
“What it brings is her tenacity in order to be not just a woman but an innovator and entrepreneur, to have a vision and idea and bring that to stage,” Solomon said. “And it really depicts the fight and the struggle and the perseverance to just bring your ideas to the world.”
(The house at 7101 Apple also had a lively second life as “Mystery Manor,” a boarding house and gathering place for local and traveling members of the Black elite.)
"Where we've been, where we're going"
“The Passion of Mary Cardwell Dawson” ends on an uncertain narrative note, with the future of the company still uncertain and Dawson asking to be remembered by history.
The company, however, did survive. In 1956, it was the first Black troupe to perform at the Met. But it continued to struggle financially, and ceased operations after Dawson’s death, in 1962.
While the National Negro Opera Company and other pioneering classically trained Black artists broke much new ground, their work was far from done. Cambridge, who plays Dawson, began her career about 25 years ago and made her Met debut in 2004, as it happens in a supporting role in “Carmen.”
Even in those days, she said, people in authority in theaters tried to downplay her race.
“I have very light skin,” she said. “And very inappropriately, things were said to me: ‘Well, you know, Alyson, you’re light. On stage, you can’t necessarily tell that you’re Black.’”
“I was often the only person of color in my casts for a very long time,” she added.
In recent years especially, she said, she’s gotten more opportunities for leading roles, not only as Bess in “Porgy and Bess” and Julie in “Showboat,” but also as Dawson and Coretta Scott King. She’s also seen opera casting become more diverse. She said that experience helps her play Dawson.
“I have seen where we’ve been and where we’re going, and I feel like that is something I’m able to bring honestly and truthfully into portraying her.”
More information on “The Passion of Mary Cardwell Dawson” is here.
