Going nuclear at Santa Fe Opera
It was imperative that Santa Fe Opera produce Doctor Atomic, the 2005 opera by composer John Adams and librettist/director Peter Sellars. Set in July 1945, the piece traces the days leading to the first detonation of an atomic bomb. Its action toggles between Los Alamos, where the bomb was developed by scientists of the Manhattan Project, and the Trinity test site near Alamogordo, about 250 miles to the south, where the explosion would take place.
When the back of the opera house’s stage is opened to the elements, as it is throughout this production, the view leads to Los Alamos, nestled in the Jemez Mountains. This is an opera redolent of our region’s history, the story of an event that continues to resonate vividly 73 years after the fact. Its main characters are the stuff of local legend, including project director J. Robert Oppenheimer, Army commander Gen. Leslie Groves, and physicists Edward Teller and Robert Wilson. The nuclear conundrum is an international anxiety, to be sure, but New Mexico makes special claim on its origin.
That in itself is enough to justify why any
opera-inclined New Mexican should seize the opportunity to see Doctor Atomic. Attendees should be in their seats 35 minutes before “curtain time,” when delegations from the San Ildefonso, Santa Clara and Tesuque Pueblos join to perform a shortened version of the Corn Dance onstage — the first time those three nations have collaborated in this sacred enactment. The participation of Tesuque dancers is particularly heartening given tensions attached to that pueblo’s current construction of a casino at its boundary with the opera. These dancers reappear twice in the opera itself, reprising the Corn Dance in a crowded Act Two dream sequence and then standing as witnesses at the end. Their presence is effective and apropos since the development of and access to Los Alamos was achieved partly on tribal land. Another group of New Mexicans also figures in this production: a group of “downwinders,” residents from near the test site whose exposure to radioactivity has led to grave health issues. They, too, take their places onstage, living testimony to the legacy of what happened seven decades ago.
The presence of these two groups adds poignancy to the production, although the downwinders are not specifically identified in the course of the performance. That is one of several aspects of this production that fall into the category of things you have to already know in order to grasp their significance. In any case, they are not really the subject of this opera, which, at heart, sets out to document the solidarity and the conflict that defined the Los Alamos team and, in some cases, the inner soul-searching that accompanied their task. At the center is Oppenheimer, portrayed as a stubborn scientist-manager given to withdrawing into the poetry of Donne and Baudelaire. He argues with colleagues Wilson and Teller about the unanswerable ethical questions that have now eluded solution for seven decades. Teller sums it up: “Could we have started the atomic age with clean hands?”
Gen. Groves lambastes meteorologist Frank Hubbard, whose predictions of inclement weather threaten the viability of the test. The strain among these men continues throughout. One of the opera’s problems is that none of these personalities really changes as the piece unrolls. We may glimpse slightly different angles of them, but one senses no psychological transformation, no growth of character, which one would think necessary to sustain three-plus hours in the opera house. It is not the fault of the performers, all of whom render commendable performances and display fine vocal qualities. Bassbaritone Ryan McKinny makes a forthright Oppenheimer, perhaps not achieving quite the aching tenderness one might wish in his concluding Act One aria, a setting of a John Donne “holy sonnet” filled with Dowlandesque melodic turns. Bass Andrew Harris brought fine resonance to the part of Teller, and bass-baritone Daniel Okulitch sang Groves with conviction and detailed finesse. (His extended passage explaining his failed weight-loss regimen made no sense, given his lanky build; it was originally crafted for the more solidly built Eric Owens, but here it probably should have been excised.) Tenor Benjamin Bliss did a superb job as Wilson, displaying a side to his elegantly modulated singing that was considerably more dramatic than the strictly lyric parts with which we most associate him. He managed to inject real life into lines that, while drawn from authentic sources, land with a thud in the libretto — for example, “A short while ago a model of the X unit fired spontaneously in a storm.” Baritone Tim Mix, as meteorologist Hubbard, sang nobly, conveying the exhaustion of this brow-beaten professional.
Unfortunately, he was sometimes drowned out by the orchestra, as was McKinny on occasion. As all the singers are amplified, some adjustments in the electronic balances for those performers could solve the problem. Matthew Aucoin led with lively aplomb on the podium, and the orchestra responded with precise enthusiasm. The symphonic writing is beautiful and engaging, sometimes encompassing Ravel-like sparkle, sometimes Wagnerian brawn, sometimes amphetamine-laced agitation. The orchestra sounded terrific, as did the formidable, well-prepared chorus.
Now to the women. Adams conceived the part of Kitty Oppenheimer (Robert’s wife) as a mezzo-soprano for its world premiere at San Francisco Opera in 2005. So she remained in the opera’s 2008 airing at the Metropolitan Opera, but for this production he has recast it as a soprano part. It sounds ideal for Julia Bullock. She proved a persuasive singing actor, boasting a beautiful tone capable of nuanced shading yet always generating her phrases from the impulse of the text. Contralto Meredith Arwady portrayed her Native American housekeeper, Pasqualita (the only character not drawn from historical sources). Her voice is impressive if not classically luscious, maintaining its power as she descends to cavernous depths. She sings a lullaby with portentous words, one that wears out its welcome through its many visits.
A fundamental issue, however, is that this is really a men’s opera. As in its two previous incarnations (you can visit both on commercial videos), this go-round fails to integrate Kitty into the basic storyline, such as it is. In her arias, and even in her ostensible love scene with her husband, she remains a figure apart, and one is left feeling that she has been superimposed on the basic framework simply to provide vocal variety. Pasqualita seems to play a more useful function, as a soothsayer. One could not ask for a better interpretation of Kitty than what Bullock offered, but I wished nonetheless that, in this revision, Adams and Sellars had either found a way to truly absorb her into the fabric of the piece or else gone the whole Billy Budd route and made it an allmale cast, or maybe an all-male cast but for a bit of Pasqualita.
The Pueblo dancing is very welcome, but there is also a separate group of four professional dancers, unnamed in the program, who hop about during the orchestral interludes (some of the score’s most sublime moments) and sometimes during arias, where they upstage the singers. This component, part of the opera’s original conception, was brilliantly realized by Lucinda Childs when the piece was new. She was to have overseen it here, too, but she quietly dropped from the roster sometime in the past year and was replaced by Emily Johnson. Much has been made of the fact that Johnson is of Native American heritage, but if we choose to view the achievement through the lens of aesthetics rather than identity, this was not a successful effort. The choreography seemed only loosely coordinated, and its abundance of jittery movements did not intensify the opera’s impact.
Sellars has proclaimed his antipathy for setting stage pieces in the eras they were written to depict, so everybody here is dressed in unremarkable modern garb. Gabriel Berry was the costume designer, but I suspect the company could have duplicated the outfits at Ross Dress for Less. Lighting by James F. Ingalls was always efficient and extended to suggesting lightning outside the building. The credits include not only a scenic designer (David Gropman) but also an associate scenic designer (Simon Schabert). Their achievement consisted of a large, ever-present, silver ball that hovers above the stage, suspended from a trestle, suggesting the plutonium core of the soon-to-be-tested bomb. A character sometimes ascends a ladder to check it out; scientists spend a few minutes standing next to railings meant to imply laboratory tables; and scenes in
the Oppenheimer home are furnished with a couple of modernistic chairs and a bench.
And then there’s the elephant in the living room. The playwright Anton Chekhov repeatedly enunciated a maxim that has become known as the Principle of Chekhov’s Gun. In one iteration, he stated, “One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off. It’s wrong to make promises you don’t mean to keep.” The silver ball has been hanging there the whole evening. The whole plot is built on whether it will explode and the ethical concerns attached to that event. The nervous tension escalates in the final 20 minutes or so. At the decisive moment, the libretto reads “The bomb detonates.” But no; in this production, that is left to the viewers’ imagination. Sellars wrote the libretto and he directs this production, so he is within his rights to do whatever he wants. Nonetheless, one could envision breathtaking ways in which this climax might have been realized, however disturbing it might have been.