AN AMERICAN CLASSIC

HE DAY after he retired from his job as an insights director for a market research firm in Manhattan, Christopher “Kip” Davis ’75 wasn’t worried about being bored.

Instead, he rushed downtown to attend rehearsals for the opera he’d helped to write in the mid ’80s. X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X opened at the Met on Nov. 3, 2023.

The project was inspired by his years at Swarthmore. Davis had taken Chuck James’s African American Autobiography course in the spring of 1974. “We read an amazing array of books, but I was especially taken with The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” he says.

He called his older brother, Anthony, who was studying music at Yale, and said, “We’ve got to write a music theater piece about Malcolm. There’s so much music in his story.” Davis saw parallels between Malcolm X’s spiritual journey and the spiritual journeys of jazz musicians in the late ’50s and early ’60s.

Davis was the only Black theater student during his Swarthmore years, he says. After college, he went on to study at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and was in its Black Actor’s workshop, which he says was a needed counterbalance to his experience at Swarthmore.

In 1980, he joined his brother in New York City. Anthony was active in the jazz scene and had connected with their older cousin, Thulani Davis, who was exploring theatrical poetry.

When Anthony was encouraged by Opera America to write an opera, Davis wrote the story for X, Anthony composed the music, and Thulani wrote the libretto.

X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X was produced at the American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. The following year, the three Davises did a workshop version at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). “It was 1985,” remembers Kip, “and after BAM refused to offer us their opera house, City Opera wanted to produce it. But there were no Black singers in the company, and their orchestra had no improvisers.”

Famed opera singer Beverly Sills came up with $200,000 to fund the production and they were able to augment the company with the singers and improvisers X required. “I loved that we were able to give Black singers material they could relate to,” he says. “I mean, how many times could they be expected to sing Porgy and Bess?!”

Before the opera opened in 1986, it became clear that Malcolm X’s family might have mixed feelings about their portrayal of the iconic figure. “We were young and, as most young artists do, we thought about the piece first — not about how his family would react,” remembers Davis. “It’s one thing to build a tragic structure around someone who has died, but another thing when his widow is still alive.”

They reached out to Betty Shabazz, but she wanted nothing to do with them. David Dinkins, the Manhattan borough president at the time, spoke to her on their behalf, explaining that the opera was meant to be an homage to her husband. Davis recalls, “And then Beverly Sills piped in, ‘What are you wearing for opening night?’ And that sealed the deal.”

After the run at City Opera, Thulani had a conversation with Sills in the elevator, which she relayed to Davis.

“Beverly said, ‘Gee, it’s too bad no one came.’ Even though every seat for every show had been filled, [X] hadn’t brought in the season-ticket holders who make opera productions financially viable. Opera companies suffer because there aren’t that many season-ticket holders left who want to support this art form.”

In the decades that followed, X was performed only once. But after the pandemic, the Met noticed that their new operas were selling seats, and reached out to Anthony, who had won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2020 for his his opera The Central Park Five. The newly renamed Detroit Opera offered to produce X, and Opera Omaha, Seattle Opera, and the Met joined in.

Davis was thrilled to bring Malcolm’s story to that venerable stage — and to have it livestreamed in HD in AMC theaters around the country, Davis says. “Malcolm is the one who said the hard truths in a way that no one else did,” he says. “What are we doing, begging to be sitting at a lunch counter? What has been taken from us is so much bigger. This country would not exist without us, yet we have only been viewed as a problem by white people.”

Davis had been preparing to retire from his day job in 2023, so the timing was perfect. He was able to attend rehearsals and give the director notes. On opening night, he and his wife sat up in the general manager’s box and waved to dozens of their friends in the seats below.

When the curtain came down, the reviewers weighed in. The New York Times gave X the highest compliment: “…[W]ith performances planned long after the run in New York, it has the opportunity to become what it always should have been: an American classic.”