Review: Doctor Atomic is as relevant as ever

The Manhattan Project is a historical event. We know the people involved, the thinking behind many of the actions taken, and its outcome. After more than 70 years, that outcome still shapes our public and personal worlds.

Composer John Adams and librettist Peter Sellars have said that opera’s multidimensional medium is well suited to convey the big picture of the bomb and its implications. The two artists created Doctor Atomic, which debuted in 2005 and is now playing through 16 August in Santa Fe, New Mexico, just down the road from Los Alamos.

The opera focuses on two central Manhattan Project figures. General Leslie Groves (played by Daniel Okulitch), who had just finished leading the construction of the Pentagon, was chosen to manage the project. He appointed as scientific director J. Robert Oppenheimer (Ryan McKinny), a well-regarded physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Many sites around the country contributed scientific and industrial expertise, and Los Alamos was where it all came together. Doctor Atomic is set in the days leading up to the 16 July 1945 Trinity test, which Manhattan Project scientists deemed necessary to evaluate the design of the plutonium bomb before wartime use.

Edward Teller (Andrew Harris) and Robert Wilson (Ben Bliss) represent the scientific staffers and their doubts—Teller the technical doubts and Wilson the moral ones. Wilson and others in the project proposed that a demonstration of the destructive power of the atomic bomb precede military use. A petition was organized, but the government decided to forgo a public display. Teller and other scientists were concerned that the heat of the atomic detonation could ignite a fusion reaction that would burn up the atmosphere. Calculations found that to be unlikely. But it was on the scientists’ minds until the test.

Sellars, who is directing the latest production, has said in talks this summer that he is emphasizing the mythic aspects of the story and how the events of the 1940s bleed into today. The opera’s sets are minimal and the costumes are modern. Hanging from a girder throughout the play is a large, highly polished metal sphere, as opposed to the more detailed representations of “the device” that appeared in previous productions. The sphere reflects the audience, the cast, and the various moods of the scenes. The bomb is always with us.

Though the stage looks different, Sellars sticks with his original libretto, which notably doesn’t contain his own words. Instead he uses Manhattan Project reports along with poetry by Muriel Rukeyser, John Donne, and Charles Baudelaire and excerpts from the Bhagavad Gita. The terse, unornamented prose of the reports contrasts with the supple words and images of the poetry. The arguments between Oppenheimer and the two scientists are offset by a tender scene between Oppenheimer and his wife, Kitty (Julia Bullock).

Myths deal with the multiplicity of fact. Sellars notes that opera, a multimedia experience, is ideal for representing that multiplicity. In preparing the show, he met with members of local pueblos, scientists, and the Tularosa Downwinders, who feel that they and their families were harmed by the Trinity test, which took place in the desert more than 350 kilometers south of Los Alamos and about 85 kilometers northwest of the town of Tularosa. Some of them appear in the opera.

The texts in the libretto present different species of fact: the measurable facts of the Manhattan Project reports, the poetic facts of emotion. Two of the Tularosa Downwinders joined Sellars in a talk before the opera and listed the cancers that friends and relatives had endured. Those are observable facts. One of them said that the Trinity device, which was tested without the town’s knowledge, was 10 times the size of the one dropped on Nagasaki. That claim conflicts with the historical record: The device tested and the bomb dropped on Nagasaki were of identical design.

But the anguish of the Downwinders is real, and it has been ignored by the government. Because there were few measurements of radiation and no monitoring of health effects in the surrounding communities, we cannot know whether those cancers are a result of the Trinity test. Studies are planned, but they will have large uncertainties. There is no way to relieve the Downwinders’ torment.

Seventy years of contemplating the questions raised by the Manhattan Project have provided some partial answers. Today Los Alamos designs nuclear weapons, but it also led a collaboration with Russian weapons laboratories in the 1990s to secure nuclear materials that the dissolution of the Soviet Union left unprotected. Los Alamos scientists continue to train International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors in the techniques they need to make sure nations are observing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. We must ponder how to deal with nuclear weapons as long as we build and stockpile them.

The lessons of Doctor Atomic are also relevant for modern, nonnuclear technologies. Facebook and other social media companies are struggling with malicious uses of their creations that were ignored until recently. But social media can bring people together in positive ways, too. The loose group sometimes called “nuclear Twitter” evaluates policy pronouncements and North Korean nuclear tests in real time. William Lanouette, a biographer of Leo Szilard, commented to me recently that this group effort is similar to that of the Manhattan Project, with updated electronic tools bringing participants together across the globe. Similar collective efforts using social media have clarified culpability for chemical attacks in Syria and Russian hacking of the 2016 American election.

The Santa Fe premiere of Sellars’s Doctor Atomic production was outstanding. Adams’s music came together for me as it had not done in a previous production I’d seen. The voices were all admirable, with Bullock’s Kitty Oppenheimer passionate and revealing. Matthew Aucoin’s conducting brought out the expressiveness of Adams’s score, although the orchestra occasionally overrode the singers. The four dancers amplified the emotional tone of some scenes but were intrusive in others.

Myths are stories we tell ourselves to learn about who we are. This myth has come back to its origin, the sipapu from which nuclear weapons emerged. We can hope, as Sellars has said, that this production in this place can help to further the process of healing.

Cheryl Rofer worked as a chemist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Now retired, she contributes to the online forums Nuclear Diner and Balloon Juice .