Looking toward Los Alamos

PETER SELLARS ON REIMAGINING DOCTOR ATOMIC

Peter Sellars on remagining the opera

ASthe sun sinks low, bathing the sky over the Jemez Mountains with a blood-red glow, Robert Oppenheimer and his minions take the stage of the Santa Fe Opera, in the lengthening shadow of Los Alamos. Doctor Atomic, the 2005 opera about the Manhattan Project created by composer John Adams and librettist Peter Sellars, has finally made its way home to the place where the Atomic Age began more than seven decades ago.

Sellars, who directed the opera’s first productions in San Francisco (where it was commissioned) and Chicago, is here to take the helm again as Doctor Atomic makes its bow at the Santa Fe Opera. But he has a fresh mandate. Charles MacKay, the Opera’s general director, told Sellars, “For Santa Fe, I’d like you to make a completely new production.”

“That was a real challenge,” Sellars recalled with a laugh. “I thought, Now, wait a minute.”

To reimagine the piece, Sellars has abandoned the meticulous recreation of the wartime period that he brought to the original production, and moved the feel, if not the date, of the action to the present day. “What was kind of thrilling was to make it a production that I would make of Mozart or Handel. I would never dream of setting those in the 18th century — I’d make them contemporary, I’d make them wear clothes like we’re wearing.” And that is what he’s done with the denizens of the Manhattan Project. “Of course, the fact is that in 1945, there was no nuclear industry. Now it’s such a bigger story. And so, by not setting it in 1945, in an obvious way, it permits you to look to the larger picture. And it’s a mirror in which we can see ourselves in so many of the decisions that these people are making. And we can gauge these decisions and say, ‘Oh, that feels like a mistake, or oh, that doesn’t ring true.’ But of course, they’re dressed like we are. And you realize, Oh! So, that’s the difference!”

It’s that perspective — the counterpoint between the desperate race in the mid-1940s to build and test the bomb, and the understanding we’ve accumulated in the years since then of the effects of radiation and the terrible threat of world annihilation — that gives this production a new source of tension and power.

“The momentum of that first blast is so powerful,” Sellars said. “And people are on deadline, and pushing, pushing, pushing, and so you get people in this intense war effort, giving everything. In mid-July 1945, the timing is a little bit complicated, morally, because Germany has surrendered. So we can’t tell ourselves that we are doing this to get there before Germany. Germany is no longer in the picture. My personal reading is that it was not the last gesture of World War II — it was the first gesture of the Cold War. And we wanted to make that clear to the Russians. What is very ironic, because the pressure to have that first blast at Alamogordo, even though many things had not been seen to, like the evacuation of the local community, is that Truman was meeting Stalin the next morning, for the Potsdam Declaration. And so Truman needed a phone call, from New Mexico, to say, ‘We have a bomb.’ What of

course Gen. Groves and the U.S. Army did not understand is that, because of British spies at Los Alamos, Josef Stalin knew much more about the bomb than Truman did!”

For Sellars, in revisiting the Pandora’s box opened by the Manhattan Project, it is impossible to escape the lessons that this opera brings home to us today. “In my work, one of the things I like doing is creating things where nobody can just leave the theater saying, ‘Oh, that was nice.’ Immediately, there’s something that sticks in your craw and makes you think, ‘What is that?’ And the discussion begins. This is going to be something that stays with you, and the longer it stays with you, if we do our job right, the more it has to be discussed. We’re really making a contribution to a longer conversation. And that’s what I think an opera does.”

The bones of Doctor Atomic, the words and music, remain unchanged since its inception. “But,” Sellars pointed out, “of course, John’s music, and so much of the poetry, can be interpreted in so many more ways. Now that we know so much more about the effects of radiation, I’m less inclined to skip over certain elements. And then this production has the incredible presence of Emily Johnson, the choreographer, who’s Native American. And the dancers are all Native American. And so the presence of Native American culture next to the culture of the labs on the Hill — that simultaneity is quite intense. When we were working on the piece 15 years ago, I was obsessed with putting next to each other two forms of technology: indigenous technology — which is if you dance long enough, and seriously enough, your ancestors will notice and send rain — versus particle physics. But in fact, they’re very close to each other in so many ways. And to hold those things next to each other is so powerful, and now the Native presence is so strong, because we’re in New Mexico. Something you couldn’t have imagined in Chicago, or in San Francisco — now in New Mexico, you feel the Native presence. It becomes really poignant, and it goes straight to your heart.”

Sitting on the terrace at the Santa Fe Opera, Sellars glanced west toward Los Alamos, where three-quarters of a century ago, Oppenheimer gathered the greatest scientific minds of the era and changed the world. “I think we’re in a situation where the issues that confronted people in 1945 are amplified a thousandfold,” he reflected. “There have been 2,000 nuclear tests since 1945. Alamogordo was just the first. And we have everyone on record, Gen. Groves in particular, as refusing to evacuate the nearby towns, refusing to understand what the effect of the fallout was going to be on populations, what it means to the people of rural New Mexico — drinking their water, milking their animals, all of that. So that’s one dimension of it. That now we know that it’s so much more serious than anyone had any idea back in 1945.”

Doctor Atomic, Sellars offered, ultimately presents a creation myth. “The creation myth around the atomic bomb was handed down to us. And now what do we do with it?”