The Grand Teton Music Festival commences its 2024 selections of “The Met: Live in HD” with Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally’s acclaimed operatic adaptation of “Dead Man Walking.”
The performance, caught on camera at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, starts at 3 p.m. Sunday in the Center Theater.
In 1982, Sister Helen Prejean struck up a correspondence with Elmo Patrick Sonnier, who was on death row at the Louisiana State Penitentiary for rape and murder. She began visiting him and served as his spiritual advisor before his April 1984 electrocution.
Afterward, Prejean continued to communicate and counsel condemned prisoners as part of her religious calling. In the process she learned all the gruesome details of the execution chamber, including how state-ordered execution affected the families, convicts, even the executioner. She began to speak out against the death penalty while at the same time founding an advocacy organization for the families of victims of crimes.
She wrote about her experiences in her 1993 best-selling memoir, “Dead Man Walking,” which in 1995 was turned into a somewhat fictionalized film adaptation starring Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of Prejean.
