Author: Michael Cooper
\nPublisher: The New York Times
\nDate: July 6, 2018<\/p>\n
Link to article: https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2018\/07\/06\/arts\/music\/dr-atomic-santa-fe-john-adams-peter-sellars.html<\/p>\n
SANTA FE \u2014 The lights of Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atomic bomb, can be seen at night from the idyllic open-air theater of Santa Fe Opera. So around here, John Adams and Peter Sellars\u2019s \u201cDoctor Atomic,\u201d about the bomb and its creators, is not just a meditation on the invention of a weapon that changed the world.<\/p>\n
It is also very much a local story \u2014 a complicated one.
\n\u201cOne of the most powerful things about doing \u2018Doctor Atomic\u2019 here is to make a history from New Mexico,\u201d said Mr. Sellars, who assembled the opera\u2019s libretto from historical sources, directed its premiere in 2005 and is rethinking aspects of it for the new Santa Fe production he is creating, which opens on July 14 and runs through Aug. 16.<\/p>\n
\u201cHere the story is, of course, the Los Alamos laboratory,\u201d he added, \u201cbut also the \u2018downwinders,\u2019 the people living with all these cancers from all the test sites \u2014 and the pueblos that are 10 minutes away from Los Alamos, where most people and their families were employed.\u201d<\/p>\n
Other operas have been staged at or near the locales where they are set; Pl\u00e1cido Domingo once starred in a television production of Puccini\u2019s \u201cTosca\u201d that was filmed live at the locations in Rome where the action takes place. But the Napoleonic wars that serve as the backdrop of \u201cTosca\u201d are nowhere near as hotly debated as the creation of the atomic bomb, and the decision to use it on Japan at the end of World War II.<\/p>\n
The nuclear threat that is the opera\u2019s theme has been in the headlines more than usual lately. The United States recently seemed closer to contemplating the use of nuclear weapons than it had in decades. President Trump, before his recent disarmament talks with North Korea, issued a bellicose warning last summer, saying threats to the United States would be \u201cmet with fire and fury like the world has never seen.\u201d<\/p>\n
The bomb is never far from the conversation here. Los Alamos remains the home of a national laboratory that still works on the nation\u2019s nuclear weapons. The success of the Manhattan Project \u2014 in which the polymathic physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was tapped by the no-nonsense Army Gen. Leslie Groves to run a secret laboratory to race Nazi Germany in creating an atomic weapon \u2014 is still locally celebrated.<\/p>\n
A statue of Oppenheimer and Groves stands outside Fuller Lodge, at the former boys\u2019 school where the scientists gathered during the war. Gift shops sell cocktail glasses with Oppenheimer\u2019s silhouette and his martini recipe painted on the outside (\u201c4 ounces good gin, a smidge of dry vermouth, lime juice and honey syrup\u201d). One of the streets, Trinity Drive, is named after the Trinity test, when the world\u2019s first atomic bomb exploded in 1945, some 200 miles to the south. A picnic late last monthcelebrated the 75th anniversary of the lab\u2019s founding.<\/p>\n
The director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, Dr. Terry Wallace, is a second-generation Los Alamos scientist who said that when he was growing up there, his Boy Scout troop would collect depleted uranium, something that would be unimaginable today. He expressed concern that the opera, which portrays the creation of the bomb as a tragedy, risked simplifying a complex moral calculus.
\n\u201cAs the director of Los Alamos, I have to make sure that we have a safe, reliable and effective nuclear deterrent,\u201d he said in an interview in Fuller Lodge. \u201cAnd I certainly would never advocate using that deterrent. But the reason we have a strategic deterrent is clear. There\u2019s only one reason: so nobody uses a nuclear weapon on us. We\u2019re very dedicated to that mission.\u201d
\nElsewhere in New Mexico, the state\u2019s atomic legacy is viewed differently. As opera rehearsals were underway in Santa Fe last month, Tina Cordova, 58, a small-business owner who lives in Albuquerque, was in Washington testifying before the Senate. She was part of a group seeking compensation from the government for damage she contends was caused by the Trinity test, which was so powerful that it melted the sand into a glasslike substance eventually named trinitite.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe government has always characterized the area as remote and uninhabited, but we know from the census data that there were thousands of people living in a 50-mile radius of the test site,\u201d Ms. Cordova, a founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, testified. One of those people, she said, was her father, who was a 4-year-old living in Tularosa, about 40 miles from the Trinity site, when the bomb exploded. He died many years later of cancer.
\nMr. Sellars said that he planned to cast downwinders in his new production. Some will stand as silent witnesses in a scene in which General Groves explains that, to maintain secrecy, he will not send evacuation forces into nearby areas. (A medical officer tells him: \u201cSir, no cure has yet been found for the agonies that result from overexposure to fallout and radiation.\u201d) Downwinders light candles each year to commemorate those who died of cancer; Mr. Sellars hopes to incorporate that ceremony into the opera as well.
\nOne morning last week, he and the opera\u2019s choreographer, Emily Johnson, took a break from rehearsals to visit the Puye Cliff Dwellings, the centuries-old remains of a Native American settlement on the Santa Clara Pueblo, a short drive from Los Alamos.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe really want this to be from here,\u201d Ms. Johnson said, adding that she had been particularly grateful that people from several pueblos had offered to perform a sacred corn dance at the opera house before the performances. (There is also a corn dance within the opera, scored by Mr. Adams, and the libretto includes a traditional Tewa song.)
\nMr. Sellars said that his new production would not labor to recreate the war era through its sets and costumes, as his earlier one did. Even the bomb itself \u2014 called \u201cthe gadget\u201d by the scientists who built it \u2014 will be a reflective sphere rather than a facsimile of the real one; Mr. Sellars wants it to represent all nuclear weapons, not just the prototype.
\nHe and Ms. Johnson toured the cliff dwellings with Mina and Jordan Harvier, Native Americans who live on the Santa Clara Pueblo and are helping arrange the corn dance. They spoke about the complex relationship the pueblo has had with Los Alamos over the decades. Both had grandmothers who worked there as housemaids; both noted that there had been years of concerns about contamination and pollution from the lab. (The government has spent hundreds of millions of dollarscleaning up Los Alamos, but still has more to do.)
\n\u201cMy grandparents always told me that Native Americans are the caretakers of this earth,\u201d Ms. Harvier said shortly before she descended into a round kiva, or ritual room, with Mr. Sellars and looked at the dried remains of what had once been the pueblo\u2019s reservoir.<\/p>\n
Mr. Sellars said that he hoped that the opera would bring people together to share their experiences and better understand one another. \u201cThat is the hope,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd what opera can do, because opera is slow: It gives people the time to think and consider \u2014 and across \u2018Doctor Atomic,\u2019 to consider more deeply and more quietly what the long-term questions are.\u201d
\nThere will be a contingent in the audience from Los Alamos. Heather McClenahan, the executive director of the Los Alamos Historical Society \u2014 which operates a museum that gives a sense of what life was like in a lab so secret that the babies who were born there had their addresses listed as \u201cP.O. Box 1663, Santa Fe\u201d on their birth certificates \u2014 said that a group planned to attend the opera and discuss it afterward at UnQuarked, a local wine bar.
\nJ. Arthur Freed, a former librarian at the lab, plans to go, as well. Which is not exactly surprising: He is something of a \u201cDoctor Atomic\u201d groupie and has seen staged productions by 11 opera companies in seven countries. Mr. Freed, a member of the J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Committee, formed to commemorate Oppenheimer, said that he viewed the work as historical fiction, but found it rewarding.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t expect it to be gung-ho atomic weapons,\u201d he said in a telephone interview. \u201cI rather expected it to have an overall anti-nuke aspect, and why wouldn\u2019t it? Don\u2019t misunderstand me: I worked for the lab for 33 years, I think it\u2019s a wonderful place, and I think it did perform and continues to perform an extremely important function for this country.\u201d
\nMs. Cordova, who testified in front of Congress, said in a telephone interview that she was intrigued by the prospect that \u201cDoctor Atomic\u201d might bring together people with different points of view about the bomb.
\n\u201cTo come together through an opera, to sort of recognize that there were many sides to this,\u201d she said, \u201ccould be hugely cathartic for all of us.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Author: Michael Cooper Publisher: The New York Times Date: July 6, 2018 Link to article: https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2018\/07\/06\/arts\/music\/dr-atomic-santa-fe-john-adams-peter-sellars.html SANTA FE \u2014 The lights of Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atomic bomb, can be seen at night from the idyllic open-air theater of Santa Fe Opera. So around here, John Adams and Peter Sellars\u2019s \u201cDoctor Atomic,\u201d about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[527,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spy","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jawidesign.com\/test\/moeberg_dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jawidesign.com\/test\/moeberg_dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jawidesign.com\/test\/moeberg_dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jawidesign.com\/test\/moeberg_dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jawidesign.com\/test\/moeberg_dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.jawidesign.com\/test\/moeberg_dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/945\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jawidesign.com\/test\/moeberg_dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jawidesign.com\/test\/moeberg_dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jawidesign.com\/test\/moeberg_dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}