A different era, yet so familiar
Some older readers may vividly remember the heyday of the nuclear arms race in the 1950s — the placement of air-raid sirens in major cities across Canada, for example, and the unbridled speculation on where missile-borne weapons of mass destruction would fall.
But for many of us, those memories boil down to grainy blackand-white footage of bomb drills in schools that had scrubbed-looking kids ducking under their desks whenever the alarms sounded (as if anyone really thought that kneeling under your desk would defend against incineration, or worse, in the event of an actual thermonuclear blast).
Such is the backdrop of the scenario offered in Green Fools Theatre’s new show, Once Upon an Atom Bomb, a musical that opens Friday at the commedia dell’arte-rooted company’s studio/theatre on Erlton Road.
According to Green Fools co-artistic director Jennie Esdale, the all-original, high-tech musical — think Twilight Zone-ish, wrapped in an “elaborate sound design,” says composer David Rhymer — is based on a story of “a little girl who has lost her mother.”
So why the Big-bang background?
“I feel we’re not actually far away from that,” Esdale says. “We’re still living in a kind of state of perpetual fear of unknown wars — foreign wars, terrorism. There’s always an imminent threat.”
Says Rhymer: “We’re so aware now of atomic bombs as being a very negative thing.”
But when Rhymer and co-creators Eric Rose and Esdale took a closer look at how the bomb was regarded in the early 1950s, they found ambivalence, writ large.
On the one hand, it stood for havoc and unparalleled devastation, Rhymer points out. On the other hand, it engendered “incredible optimism.”
“It was the beginning of the atomic age,” Rhymer says, describing the euphoric thinking of the era as “extraordinary.”
People would go out from Las Vegas, for example, watch the explosions in the desert, and then go back to their respective lounges for “space martinis,” he notes.
(And didn’t Bikini, the Pacific atoll that was another site for A-bomb tests, become a synonym with modern sexiness?)
For Esdale, the Once Upon an Atom Bomb time frame made possible “a connection to the Second World War, the dropping of the bomb (on Japan), the explosion of technology — and how the world changed after that.
“And this little girl is right in the midst of it all.”
The little girl also has a fascination with space — specifically, black holes that are perhaps more of the imagination than fact and that are such that, when she steps through the first of them, she enters a puppet world.
And our young heroine also has a friend, whom some of us may remember from that post-war best-of-times/worst-of-times era: Bert the Turtle — the anthropomorphic, US governmentsanctioned cartoon character who showed everybody “how to protect themselves from atomic fallout,” Esdale says.
Bert’s answer, as produced in 1951 by U.S. civil defence authorities? The film, Duck and Cover.
“We found that to be horrifying and hilarious,” Esdale says.
“It told us that the things we were doing to prepare and protect ourselves from horror, despair, sorrow and grief, are not adequate, culturally.
Obviously, the Bert the Turtle guy isn’t going to protect this little girl — and she discovers that.
Nothing can protect her from facing this loss of her mother. Ultimately, Esdale says, “she has to do it on her own.”