Doctor atomic batter my heart poem2/19/2024 ![]() She can’t have been very nice to be around, but she was admirable in a way. “She spent her time drinking and not giving dinner parties. “She must have been incredibly frustrated,” Woolcock says. Kitty Oppenheimer was a smart, difficult, flirtatious ex-communist who lost one husband to the Spanish Civil War, divorced another when she became pregnant by Oppenheimer, and then raged through her role as Wife of the Father of the Bomb. “Then there’s Kitty,” Woolcock says with the relish of a director who has discovered her great dramatic character, “there’s Kitty.” Woolcock has never directed staged opera before (she filmed Adams’s Death of Klinghoffer), but she knows a diva vehicle when she sees one. (Gerald Finlay, the baritone who created the role, will sing it again at the Met.) At his side in the lab was Edward Teller, seething and incubating his later role as Oppenheimer’s nemesis. Robert Oppenheimer, the scrawny, charismatic chieftain in a porkpie hat who chain-smoked, mixed a mean martini, and had a genius for orchestrating other people’s insights. “You have to remember, the average age was 25.” “When they weren’t doing physics, these people were drinking and copulating all the time,” Woolcock chortles. “And you can’t do anything on the stage to approximate the horror of Hiroshima.” In place of a dummy bomb will be a sculptural arrangement of debris frozen in midair, derived from Cornelia Parker’s Cold Dark Matter.ĭuring the months leading up to the nuclear pyre called Trinity, Los Alamos was a sealed-off hothouse of intense young men and women, and it’s on their tangled rivalries and friendships that Woolcock plans to focus. ![]() That demon idol waiting to detonate, an oppressively symbolic gesture, was pure Peter Sellars: He directed the first production and constructed the libretto out of transcripts, oral histories of the Manhattan Project, the Bhagavad-Gita, and the fierce, exact poetry of Muriel Rukeyser and John Donne.īut the bomb-the “gadget,” they called it at Los Alamos-will be banned from the Metropolitan Opera when Adams’s masterpiece arrives in a new production by the English film director Penny Woolcock. ![]() When Doctor Atomic, John Adams’s opera set on the last night of the pre-nuclear age, premiered in San Francisco in 2005, a clunky, wire-swaddled bomb hung over the stage. Illustration by Julien Pacaud Photo: Eddie Adams/AP (Oppenheimer) ![]()
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