Doctor Atomic’s blast zone

The latest production ofDoctor Atomic, the opera about the birth of the Nuclear Age by composer John Adams and director/librettist Peter Sellars, saw it coming “home” to New Mexico, where the story is set. In the process, it became a stunning, unrepeatable artistic event. I was lucky to see one of the performances at the Santa Fe Opera this summer, staged only several miles away from Los Alamos, recalling the frantic months leading up to the first atomic explosion in July 1945.

With the desert vista spreading around the open walls of the opera house, and Los Alamos lying some 20 miles beyond the open backstage, a rare synchrony clicked into place between opera and site. And Sellars’ new production went beyond this, making other connections tangible that had only been hinted at before.

Doctor Atomic brings to life the consuming moral conflicts that colored the Manhattan project. Onstage, the characters trace a deadly dance: at the center, the brooding J. Robert Oppenheimer, the research director at Los Alamos; Edward Teller (who would later testify against Oppenheimer), radiating a dark acceptance of the responsibilities they will all bear; another physicist, Robert Wilson, whose attempt to petition the President not to use the bomb was overruled. This staging included a radically simplified set dominated by a huge reflective metal sphere hanging above the stage, and unobtrusive street clothes for costumes.

First of all, let me say
that I have no hope
of clearing my conscience.

- Edward Teller

Adams and Sellars have collaborated before, notably on the pathbreaking and provocative operas Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer. In producing the score for Doctor Atomic, Adams has said he wanted to “musically” paint a picture of “this very sci-fi kind of vision”—“this scene of Alamogordo, a very remote desert place… almost like the landscape of the moon, with this eerie tower, with this strange object hanging from it”—the prototype bomb.

Invited to create a new production for Santa Fe, Sellars leaped in with his usual ferocious enthusiasm, working not only to connect it not only to the land and local history, but to its inhabitants. The Pueblo Indians near the site of the first explosion suffered the first radiation injuries of any human community—weeks before Hiroshima, with effects that have lasted over generations. The director met with these “Downwinders” for months leading up to the performance, and with members of other Pueblo tribes surrounding Santa Fe.

Ultimately, this led to their participation in the opera, in ways that transformed and deepened it. The members of the Santa Clara, San Ildefonso, and Tesuque Pueblos agreed to allow its members to perform parts of the sacred Corn Dance, before the show began each evening, and as part of the hallucinatory second act portraying the nocturnal countdown to the explosion at dawn on July 16, 1945. And some Downwinders also took part, as still, solemn witnesses to the scenes that had so affected them—including Gen. Leslie Groves’ refusal to notify or evacuate the surrounding towns, though already knowing the toxic effects of radiation. This silent chorus of witnesses ranged in age from youths to people old enough to have been alive then—generations sharing a forgotten legacy.

This was remarkable in so many ways. In the context of continuing cultural appropriation of Indian traditions, the Pueblos’ decision to make a gift of their sacred dance, for the purpose of a wider societal healing around the history of atomic weaponry—a history that they themselves suffered from—demonstrates a grace and wisdom we rarely see. By this gesture, as holders of the land, they embodied and strengthened a counterposing worldview, one within which the bomb’s making would be inconceivable. In the opera’s libretto, that worldview is represented by a single character, Pasqualita, the Indian nursemaid to the Oppenheimers’ children.

In the west the cloud-flower blossoms,
And now the lightning flashes,
And now the thunder clashes,
And now the rain comes down!

- Pasqualita (Tewa Lullaby)

Before one performance, Sellars talked about the opera’s contrasting of two technologies: a kind of indigenous technology, where “if you dance long enough, and seriously enough, your ancestors will notice and send rain,” with the Western deployment of scientific theory and methods toward a practical goal. The indigenous technology may have worked too well: one night, audience and performers were buffeted by wind and rain, the singers and dancers going barefoot on a rain-slick stage while lightning and thunder cracked around them. At this moment of literal danger (which my friend saw but I didn’t) the boundaries between art, symbol, and life—the actual thunderstorm; the historic summer thunderstorm that delayed the first explosion till dawn (part of the opera’s second act); and the atmospheric explosion of the bomb—merged into one wild, moving, meta-performative whole.

All this helped move the opera deeper into the territory Adams has described as opera’s strong suit: addressing “large issues of… our collective experience… themes deep in the psyche of a nation [that] can be addressed in a way that no other art form can quite do it.” The place-specific alchemy of this production brought these deep-buried themes to new life in a way that could only have happened here.

Some of the craziness of the past seven decades has been fed by our massive inability or unwillingness to reckon with the power humanity now has to destroy itself. Doctor Atomic doesn’t resolve those issues, but challenges us to keep them alive for ourselves, as individuals and as a community.

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Also published on Medium.