I Am A Miracle's Over-Familiarity Is A Tragedy

In August 2012, Marvin Lee Wilson was executed in Texas. He had an IQ of 61; the US considers anyone with an IQ lower than 70 to be intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible for execution, so of course his death sparked media interest. Theatre maker Declan Greene admits reading an article about the case was the genesis of his latest work, I Am A Miracle. “I was really struck by the story and thought it was really awful… but one of the things about it that stuck in my mind was Marvin Lee Wilson’s last words, which were, in part, ‘Take me home, Jesus. Take me home, Lord. I ain’t left yet, must be a miracle, I am a miracle,’ and I thought there was something really astonishing about those last words.”

"It’s a terrible story but it’s also incredibly, tragically over-familiar."

Greene started to write what could have been Wilson’s biography, but as he researched more and more he found that the story was already familiar to him. “It’s the story about an African-American man born into abject poverty in Texas, who had absent parents, who had learning difficulties, who fell into crime, who eventually shot a police informant and ended up on death row. It’s a terrible story but it’s also incredibly, tragically over-familiar; I think its over-familiarity is precisely its tragedy. So I started thinking about this and went, actually, it would be interesting – rather than telling the story – to essentially tell a story about that story, and to comment on it and tie it much more directly into contemporary life here in Australia.” 

And so I Am A Miracle became about three narratives that articulate the struggle for justice and freedom against oppression. One is based on the journal of real-life Dutch navy captain John Stedman, who worked as a soldier at a slave colony in the 1770s; this story is echoed in the second (fictional) narrative, set in contemporary Melbourne, about a man who is trapped by his carer. “Then there’s a third story, which is a moment of fantasy… about a divine figure, this angel – for lack of a better word – watching over the execution of Marvin Lee Wilson, who sets about dreaming of a way to rewrite the past and essentially bring about a new set of possibilities for the future. So it’s a light-hearted comedy!” laughs Greene.

Considering Wilson’s final words were the catalyst for the show, an implication of the miraculous was inevitably going to be present in it. One of the ways this is represented is through a “beautiful, ancient-sounding but very contemporary score” composed by David Chisholm and performed by operatic soprano Hana Lee Crisp. In fact, Greene considers I Am A Miracle to be an opera, in a non-traditional sense, as well as a theatre piece. “The scale of the work is huge and it’s definitely driven by music, and the themes of the work are so completely epic, and very earnest in a lot of ways – kind of an attempt to encapsulate some huge part of the human experience... I think there’s something very operatic about that.”