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John Packard on Joe De Rocher
'You could walk down the street and meet a guy like him'

By Robert Wilder Blue

The nature of acting, of course, is that it doesn't take a rapist and murderer to play one on stage. Nonetheless, when we spoke to John Packard about creating the role of Joe De Rocher in Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking, we realized quickly that he was about as far away from that character as one could get. Well-educated and articulate, he seemed like one of the nicest guys you'd ever want to know.

John was born in Elmhurst, Illinois, outside of Chicago. His family moved to Allentown, Pennsylvania and then eventually to Philadelphia, where he still resides. "My family wasn't really musical. Growing up, I sang in church choir and boys' choir. And I was a band geek. I played trombone and guitar through college. Opera wasn't thrust upon me, it just kind of happened in college. I didn't think of singing as a career until my junior year in college. Some people heard me and encouraged me to take lessons and I really got into it. I had practiced instruments before and had enjoyed it, but never realized how thrilling it was to sing.

"I went to Concordia College in Bronxville, New York. I still have a connection with them: the gentleman who was the choir director and president of the college (it was a very small college) came out to San Francisco for the performances. After college, I worked two years in the hotel industry and then entered the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia. That was really my apprenticeship program. I never got accepted to any of the training programs. I won a couple of competitions; the Richard Tucker grant a couple of times, the Jacobson grant, which is a study grant."

John won the role of Joe after a cattle-call audition -- not the normal process in opera. "By the time I got home from San Francisco there was a message on my machine saying that I got the part. That was like winning the lottery! Dead Man Walking was really the first high-profile project I was involved in. It was such a wonderful experience. Everyone was so excited by this project. We really knew it was going to be a success - during rehearsals the crew and everyone was saying they had never seen anything like it. We were like a big family. Susan Graham and Flicka [Frederica von Stade] were tremendous colleagues and I don't think anyone felt left out. I think the success was everybody's. It was a group effort. Everyone from the crew to the orchestra was ebullient with the praise for the singers. Maybe because the subject was so tough, everyone was very tight in this production. PBS was filming a documentary for three-quarters of the rehearsals, which sort of infringed on us a bit. There were boom mikes hanging over our heads, so often we censored our comments quite a bit. We didn't want to be caught on film saying something we shouldn't."

"There is nothing like this role in the legitimate baritone repertory as far as I can see. There is Scarpia [in Puccini's Tosca] and the secondary bad-guy type of baritone roles. Joe de Rocher is such a really awful person - you can't get much more awful than committing murder and rape - which is your introduction to the character. But still, he represents something that was very real and present, something that was going on right now in our society. You could walk down the street and meet a guy like him.

"It's a wonderful acting role, though it is emotionally exhausting. I wanted to make him as real as possible, and yet get some kind sympathetic response by the end of the opera - to have him take a journey. I think he realizes in the end that this is his only opportunity to confess and make a change. He may as well do one decent thing since he'd never done a decent thing in his life until then. It was quite a purging role in that anything negative that is on your mind before you go on stage is certainly gone by the end of the opera.

"I watched the movie so many times, I practically memorized it. I didn't play him as Sean Penn, although I did take some things from the movie, certainly. [Director] Joe Mantello and [librettist] Terrence McNally saw him as a sort of an "Everyman" death row inmate. I wanted him to be more sympathetic than he was in the movie. I wanted people to be able to relate to him in some way. There was some criticism about that. Some would have preferred that I play him as a mean bastard. But he's still a human being and he still loves his mother. And because Mrs. DeRocher's part is greater in the opera, that made Joe more sympathetic. A lot of people disagreed with that also. Some people wanted there to be more sympathy for the parents of the victims. But it turned out that Mrs. DeRocher was one of the most sympathetic characters on stage.

"With a contemporary subject like this, everything has to be as believable as possible. La Bohème and Tosca are wonderful stories, but they are not happening right now. First of all, this guy is young and everything about him is young - the inexperience, the way he handles himself with Sister Helen - there's not a whole lot of maturity. I think to make it believable for the audience, the person shouldn't be over 40 - it would too much of a suspension of belief. He has to appear to be in his late twenties and rough-looking. He's got to be the kind of guy you'd cross the street to avoid. The original idea for the character was a guy who doesn't really fit into society, somebody who would never be looked up to. He is kind of a runt -- he's not tall and he's not very good-looking. He has those strikes against him. Believe me, when I visited death row, there were no attractive people there. They're a little dumpy looking; they don't have the opportunity to exercise as the general population does. They can do push-ups, sit-ups and there's a dip bar they can use one hour a day."

We wondered how John prepared himself for the first scene in the opera, which recreates in graphic detail the rape and murders. "I made up my own scenario about why he raped her -- that he and his brother were hanging out at the bar and the wild oats were stirring. He approached the girl and she laughed in his face. We don't know what transpired between the guys after they left the bar and went to the lake, but probably the brother was egging him on a little - 'you can't get laid,' that kind of thing that friends and brothers do - rib each other. So when they saw the girl and her boyfriend, it was sort of a spite thing - 'I'll show you.' I don't think he intended to kill her, but she started screaming and that was a trigger of something else that had happened, a traumatic instance in his life perhaps, maybe his mother screaming at his father. There are a dozen different possibilities, but I had a concrete idea of why he did it. Whether it read for the audience was not as important as the fact that it worked for me. I tried to rationalize everything this guy said and did because it made more sense to me that way."

"When we were first rehearsing the execution scene, it was really hard. I really used my experience of seeing death row and actually doing a day at Angola prison. I went through the last day - what it would be like to be in the shackles and take that drive and then the walk to the death chamber. I used all that in that final scene, and it was hard to let go of it instantly. After the execution, the curtain went down and they unstrapped me and got me off the table. I was glad that there was a large cast for the curtain calls because it took a few minutes to get back to reality. I put my boots on for the curtain call and just tried to keep breathing! And then I went out for my bow. After the first performance it took maybe a day and a half to really come down. I woke up very emotional the morning after opening night. But as the performances went on, I got better at it - it was like a technique. By the final performance it only took about an hour to return to myself.

"I didn't enjoy being in that space for a long time. When Opera Pacific does it next spring there will be a number of performances back to back. It's not that the thing is so hard to sing -- it's that it's emotional and it rips you apart that way. It takes a certain technique to survive."

Do you think this subject is disturbing partly because we're afraid of that evil buried in each of us? "Everyone knows someone like that - not on death row necessarily - but that same kind of guy. It only takes a number of hard knocks to have somebody go the wrong way and I think that's what happened to this guy. I think that the character exists in all of us, to an extent. I think people will explore or revel in that side of themselves but they don't want to reveal it. In a way, people cheer for Hannibal Lecter [the seductive villain from the film The Silence of the Lambs], who is a compelling, brilliant character - a man who has decided to be evil. But, is there such a thing as enough redemption for somebody who has committed such a horrible act that they could actually contribute to society again? I did and still do take a lot of flack about my stance on the death penalty. Most of my family is in favor of it. It was nice to hear my father say after he saw the performance that he was on the fence. No one really thinks about it - if you don't have to, why think about it? It's an unpleasant subject. But for these three hours people do. And with music - and music certainly gets to the heart of the matter, it really affects us. A powerful story like Dead Man Walking put to good music is very affecting."

Do you get the same satisfaction from a role like Joe de Rocher as you would from a more traditional 19th century Italian role, such as Rodrigo in Verdi's Don Carlo? "It's very satisfying to affect people emotionally. Sure, it's satisfying to sing a wonderful aria and get a big ovation, but to see people with tear-stained cheeks, as they were after Dead Man Walking is somehow more satisfying. Certainly, I was kind of numb on opening night at the curtain calls. It was my wife and family who told me how the audience reacted. There are pluses to both sides, but I think that affecting people in their hearts is more satisfying."

See also related conversations with:
Jake Heggie
Kristine Jepson
Susan Graham
Frederica Van Stade
Teddy Tahu Rhodes