On a freezing December night at the Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church in Society Hill, a station on the Underground Railroad, a small audience was transfixed by the sad, strange saga of Margaret Garner.

She was an African American slave who escaped from a Kentucky plantation in 1856 and, while being recaptured, killed her 2-year-old daughter rather than let her face a life of slavery.

"What a choice! It's Sophie's Choice," said the evening's narrator, Charlotte Blake Alston, referring to the novel about a woman who was forced to leave one of her children in a Nazi death camp.

Garner was exploited for sex as well as for labor. "The whole point [of American slavery]," said Alston, who has read firsthand accounts, "was to brutalize you to the point where you did not believe you were human."

Margaret Garner, which the Opera Company of Philadelphia is premiering locally on Friday, has been preceded by 20 outreach events, many led by Alston, a Philadelphia storyteller commissioned by OCP. The events were essentially advertisements to a community not necessarily oriented toward opera, much less a brand-new work.

But, as Alston tells it, request after request came in for her condensation of the Toni Morrison libretto, one of the few slave narratives told from a woman's viewpoint, plus musical excerpts sung by Tracie Luck and James J. Kee. In addition, both dress rehearsals of the opera will have student audiences.

"It's not an easy topic... but the awareness of the piece is extraordinary," said Robert B. Driver, the OCP chief who helped to shepherd Margaret Garner to fruition over the last five years. "We're a little surprised, frankly."

How successfully these efforts translate into ticket sales remains to be seen. Group sales, which usually indicate strong support from special-interest parties, stood at $80,000 two weeks ago - more than OCP's entire group sales last season. That's 1,200 tickets from 38 groups, including the Red Hat Honeys (a social organization for women over 50) from Baltimore. However, of the 4,000 nonsubscription tickets available, 65 percent had been sold three weeks before the premiere, which is good, but not great.

The opera was commissioned by OCP, Michigan Opera Theatre, and Cincinnati Opera. From the announcement of their collaboration to early workshops in Florida to the world premiere in Detroit last spring, OCP knew the challenges it faced even with its base audience, which has a history of staying away from anything that's not Opera's Greatest Hits.

Still, support for the project from the OCP board was unflagging, even amid the post-9/11 box-office challenges - unlike the sad case of Ballymore, the Richard Wargo opera that was workshopped here, languished due to lack of board support, but went on to a successful Milwaukee premiere in 1999.

Margaret Garner had insurance from the beginning, with a team likely to appeal to regular opera audiences as well as new ones: star mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves in the title role, audience-friendly composer Richard Danielpour (whose works have been successfully received here), and African American icon Morrison as librettist.

Ultimately, though, the opera's appeal in Philadelphia lies primarily in the power of the story, Alston said. "Care was taken in crafting the story so that it doesn't tear into people. We get locked into this victim oppression - you owe me this and that - but here, we're not just shouting and screaming at each other. This piece is our shared history. And Toni Morrison is a genius at peeling gently back the emotions and psychology to show the transformative aspects of this woman's story."

What place, then, does the centuries-old medium of opera have in telling the tale? "All of the senses are stimulated. All the synapses are firing," said Alston, "and that can allow the audience to internalize something that they otherwise might not when heard or seen in another place."

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