Interview: Peter Sellars

Abstract

Doctor Atomic's creator argues that art and science do the same thing: permit us to think in new ways.

Edward Teller is wearing blue jeans and pouring himself a drink. He is in a jocular mood, a flutter of gestures as he wonders whether the first atomic bomb detonation, called Trinity, will ignite the atmosphere. Kitty Op-penheimer, J. Robert's wife, doesn't react well to the possibility. But she's been looking stunned for many moments now. It is July 16,1945, and they're waiting for the rain to stop so that the bomb test can proceed. Teller is upbeat and ironic. He passes out suntan lotion to his young colleagues, advising: “Pass it around.” There is music–and tension–in the air. And then it all stops. Director Peter Sellars has called a halt to the countdown and takes the stage.

It's early afternoon at Chicago's Lyric Opera House and the day of the first stage rehearsal of Doctor Atomic, an opera by John Adams and Sellars, whose subject is the Trinity test and the irrevocable move from the pre- to the post-nuclear age. A six-year collaboration, the opera premiered in San Francisco two years ago. Its staging in Chicago elicited rave reviews. The Metropolitan Opera in New York will stage the opera in the fall.

It's odd to hear the language of physics sung. Sellars appropriated verbatim quotes and firsthand accounts to propel his story. So, when Teller talks about the gadget (as the bomb is called) as “not contrary to our knowledge but beyond our experience,” it's odd to hear it set to music. Likewise, when the words hydrogen, nitrogen, and helium are sung they may not be in their natural element.

But no matter. Sellars calls the break to refine what's happening on stage. He is cordial and collaborative with his performers. He makes spare suggestions–the way Teller uses his glass to make a point, how Oppenheimer and his wife interact with their baby–all of which are eagerly accepted. Sellars furthers the notion that directors actually know more about motivations than the rest of us do. And he's polite as a matter of course, praising the musical staff one moment (“Thank you. I'm getting so much profiling. It's very exciting”) and the passing stage hands who are deftly handling a 20-foot ladder, another (“Thank you. You guys are terrific”).

Doctor Atomic's score is over 500 pages. Place marks have names such as B-5, which is where Sellars wants to resume. The assistant director calls it out: “B-5; B, as in Barium, 5.” The company takes delight in irradiating everything. After getting the scene done again, Sellars announces: “Now, a beautiful luncheon break! Massive 3 o'clock rehearsal! Enjoy lunch!”

Sellars has famous hair. It lunges straight up from the top of his head and gives him an additional inch or two of height, not that he needs it. Its effect, up close, is similar to punctuation–like a friendly exclamation point. He also has the most energy in any room, and gives off the impression that he is somehow spring-loaded. This kinesis is evident even when he's sitting, one leg cinched underneath the other. His tastes are catholic, he will explain one moment how the notion of democracy informed the structure and staging of Greek drama, at another moment he'll reference some of the finer points of pop culture.

To say he is passionate about his work doesn't do justice to the experience of listening while he's in the midst of an entertaining intellectual fugue. His persuasion is effortless, and converts find themselves agreeing with and dazzled by his cerebral flourishes. Curiously, the effect isn't like being run over by his train of thought. He doesn't use his candlepower to impose, but rather to engage. He is intensely affable and a prodigious hugger.

Sellars went from Phillips Andover to Harvard University, graduating in 1981. As an undergraduate, he produced Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle–with puppets. It was the first of several theatrical gestures that would garner attention beyond Harvard Yard. After graduation, he studied in China, Japan, and India. He directed the Boston Shakespeare Theater and became the director of the American Theater Company at age 26. His staging of Mozart's operas Don Giovanni (set in Spanish Harlem), Cosifan Tuti (in a diner on Cape Cod), and The Marriage of Figaro (in Trump Tower) gained recognition in the U.S. and abroad. His previous collaborations with Adams include Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer. In addition to many other activities, he is professor of World Arts and Culture at U.C.L.A. where he teaches the course “Art as Moral Action.”

Managing Editor John Rezek met with him in Chicago.

BAS: Do art and science ask the same questions?

SELLARS: Yes, and they come up with different answers. We're always in the middle of certain given cosmologies that, up to a certain point, both inform and limit the questions we're asking and the answers we're willing to accept. And what's exciting in both art and science are those moments of paradigm shift–where suddenly a new set of questions can be asked and answered quite differently. And we, S of course, are also involved with that in the history of art where we ask: What is the relation of man to the universe? And this question gets answered differently at different times, based on the given cosmologies. The shape of imagination is also the shape of the known universe at that moment. But there are those breakthrough individuals whose imagination is able to make the shift into a universe that is not yet known. And then we begin to ask another set of questions and move out in another set of directions. So what's beautiful about both the arts and sciences is that they have their breakthroughs, but they also have their limitations. I'm very much coming from growing up in the twentieth century, when for many people, science was made into God, a substitute for religion.

And it's bad enough for a religion to be a religion, but when science becomes religion, it's very dangerous. The atom bomb was the moment where science moved into this new realm. Science became God and had to answer all questions. And in fact, there are a lot of questions that science can't answer and shouldn't. But everything tried to become science to justify its existence, and so we invented sociology and social science and political science. Everything that isn't scientific tried to act like it was. And we began to deal with everything statistically and in terms of measurable results. Many things in life are intangible, can't be measured, and can't be rendered in terms of quantity, but in fact are about quality.

It's time to take back 70 years ot proliferation and say, okay, the genie may be out of the bottle, but we don't need these weapons. Let's eliminate all the weapons, and this technology can continue, but under different conditions.

And that part of life became devalued or occluded because numbers couldn't be attached to it. We're trying in the twenty-first century to argue that those things that don't have a price tag and a numerical value are also part of our experience.

The unquantifiable is also a dimension that science has moved into, in very powerful ways. So we're moving into a new set of parallel universes between art and science, which again, are moving into this unquantifiable realm. And we're both pushing the edge of the known world–with limitations. Consider, for example, standard medical practices 100 years ago. It's a good example of where incomplete assessments of a complex picture produced monstrous results. We look back with some embarrassment, but it makes you wonder how many things that are now accepted as gospel will, 100 years from now, be similarly embarrassing? What's interesting about art and science is that the ball is in play.

BAS: Science aspires to be bias-neutral or objective in intent. What are the limits to this approach?

SELLARS: The one thing twentieth century science gave us is the confirmation that there is no such thing as objectivity. Any semblance of it has to be recognized for its possibility, both politically and scientifically, but also with a humane grasp of its limits. Physics has given us a much more complicated notion and puts us into what the Buddhists would call co-dependent arising. This is this way because that is that way. Everything is a constant interaction, and that relational sense of how things are operating is much more powerful than the notion that we can isolate something and describe it, when in fact, nothing is ever in isolation. Treating them as if they were has produced a series of disastrous consequences.

BAS: Scientists led us into the atomic age without a complete moral roadmap to help us navigate within it. Should we believe that they have the ability now to help us find our way out?

SELLARS: What's marvelous is that scientists, like a lot of artists, have a very refined moral sensibility. But, of course, there are as many scientists as there are artists who are sheer opportunists. But most scientists have a deep sense of moral awareness. Both scientists and artists make decisions which have an ultimately moral destination.

Now most scientists have recognized that nuclear technology, with its stockpiles of weapons, is a dead end–for science and for the planet. And it's time to take back 70 years of proliferation and say, okay, the genie may be out of the bottle, but we don't need these weapons. Let's eliminate all the weapons, and this technology can continue, but under different conditions.

We don't have to act as if these weapons are a permanent act of the universe. Why are things that are not very old imagined as part of the world that can never be changed? They've always been with us. Well, they haven't always been with us. One of the reasons this opera is set on this one night, July 16, 1945, is that it's the last moment of the pre-nuclear age. It's very important to be able to imagine that, but re-imagine it in our own lifetime. We can say that was a blind and dark alley, and very costly for everyone. And now it's time to regroup and re-imagine what this technology has to offer.

It doesn't make any sense to have countries with gigantic stockpiles telling the rest of the world you can't have this. And as long as it's on the menu people are going to keep trying to order it. It has to be removed from the menu. This is where we're asking for scientists to be citizens, not just specialists. It's the same for the artists. There are as many artists who are pursuing art for art's sake, as there are scientists pursuing science for science's sake. We need people who are aware that their specialization carries a larger responsibility.

And we do have scientists who are willing to speak and speak powerfully. And now we need to get them a microphone that's hooked up to a few more speakers.

BAS: We are more aware of global warming now then we were 18 months ago, whether or not we have the details right. But how would you account for that global threat to have hit a chord that nuclear proliferation has not?

SELLARS: One of the difficulties of the nuclear movement, in spite of the incredible efforts of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, is that it remains beyond the grasp of most citizens. The U.S. education system has been taken hostage by the No Child Left Behind program. This is making America a third-rate power–when you want your children to know less than you know, and have a worse education than you had. Education has been reduced to test taking; productive thought and creative response are eliminated from the curriculum. Your entire life is someone else's idea of multiple choice. The highest grade is given to the person who repeats back exactly what they were told. This doesn't encourage exploration, which doesn't encourage experimentation, which doesn't encourage the imagination required for a paradigm shift.

BAS: How can we maintain a positive focus when we live in such a cynical and venal age?

SELLARS: This century had a very difficult birth. It was truly hijacked by George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden. A whole series of things were scuttled, including the pursuit of alternate energy sources.

But it's not just a question of finding new sources. It's also about living differently. These things were removed from the debate, and oil was once again our future. Our foreign policy reinforced that. And people are finally seeing this as a terrible mistake.

But again, America goes through these nightmare periods. I link these years with the 1950s–this extreme secrecy and occlusion of public discussion about defense issues and science. One of the things we're paid to do as artists is interrupt the general flow and create some moment of awareness and a sense that these things are still open to question, and certainly open to discussion.

Activism is going to come from the environmental and food issues, especially as we realize that all these issues are interconnected. Your consuming patterns are about your ecological footprint, and your ecological footprint has large implications and consequences. You can make a difference through your choice of what to eat three times a day. Plus the internet is an important tool to reform and re-imagine communities and solidarities. This sort of coalition building transcends geography. And that's very powerful.

Here we are in Chicago where peanut futures in West Africa are being decided. The internet allows us to be in direct contact with people in another part of the world whose reality was unimaginable to us, but now can be imagined, and be engaged. Americans as consumers may realize the size of their footprint from the internet.

BAS: Genetic engineering has made huge advances in the ability to alter, for good or for expediency, many life forms. Who's to tell those engineers when to put on the brakes?

SELLARS: Understanding the limits to human knowledge and intervention is going to be the question in the twenty-first century. One of the most powerful things that spiritual practices have presented throughout human history is certain limits, certain no-go zones, certain humility in the face of the natural facts of the planet. That sense of humility and genuine awe is missing right now, because we view everything in terms of pure mechanics and act as though nature is available for us to use. And we're constantly treating things in terms of their utility rather than with a sense of beauty, or a sense of a larger moral awareness of something unfolding. We're not the largest things in the universe. And nature isn't just here as our toy inviting our intervention and available for our lifestyle choices. And that to me is one of the most profound things that religion had to offer.

So much religion, like so much science, suffers from mistaking what are temporary conditions for doctrine. That's why artists' intervention in religious history has been so important. Michelangelo can create something that goes beyond the doctrine. Artists are always able to create a new space that gets us past the doctrine, and gets us into something perhaps more essential than the doctrine.

We're constantly up against these very refined judgments between what represents human ability and limitation, and what represents the law of the universe. Artists and scientists are both engaged in those series of questions. But we are in a period of such mass consumerism that people don't want to accept limits on anything. Everything is sold to you as “all you can eat.” The waste that that involves is colossal. And the arrogance is unspeakable.

BAS: So how best can we encourage and enable action and engagement?

SELLARS: The more we can personalize these things for a generation that takes everything very personally, the better.

We're in a period of ridiculously prolonged childhood, where young adults are being marketed to as permanent kids. And childhood is being extended forever. For me that's the anti-science, anti-expertise, anti-knowledge bias of this period. Strangely, these global warming issues are reaching right into the heart ofthat protracted childhood. The infantile consumer says I want this, this, and this. And nobody wants to say: you have to be responsible if you're going to want that.

BAS: What should scientists read, see, listen to, to prepare for some kind of epiphanic moment?

SELLARS: Oh, my God, that's wonderful. I'm used to encountering scientists who are extraordinary musicians, who are informed poetry readers, and have beautiful art on their walls at home. I took David Layzer's “Space, Time, and Motion” class at Harvard, and I should have gotten a D (laughing). But we could discuss Shakespeare. He was the leader of a string quartet, and we discussed music. And so he was very generous to me.

If anyone wants a suggestion, get to know John Adams's music. I think of him as the Beethoven of our era. He's shifted music back to tonality, which is an interesting question not unrelated to physics. Are there built-in, involuntary responses when we locate ourselves within this harmonic system? Certain emotions are literally touched by certain chords. There are profound laws of harmonic intervals that connect to the way our emotional systems are wired. And John is the main composer shifting us back into this harmonic universe, along with Philip Glass and Steven Reich. But John has brought back a moral dimension, which connects more to the sense of civic engagement, which connects more to Beethoven.

Glass and Reich have remained more in the realm of pure science, as it were. John's music always engages issues. And I think people would really enjoy getting to know the body of work that leads to Doctor Atomic.

Again, in terms of paradigm shifts, our generation grew up with Stravinsky and Schoenberg being the ideological extremes and you had to be in one camp or the other. Stravinsky and Schoenberg both lived in Beverly Hills and refused to say a word to each other in all of those years. Of course, once Schoenberg dies, Stravinsky starts writing 12-tone music.

John and his generation reintroduced C-major, and not as a cliche, and not as a nostalgic act. He takes several musical languages and puts them into Doctor Atomic. Musically sensitive scientists in the audience will appreciate the amazing rhythmic variety, because John is literally giving you the musical image of instability. There is a meter change every two or three bars for two and a half hours. What is going on underneath everyone constantly shifts. And that sense of an unstable universe is what Robert Serber described in his Los Alamos Primer: “be disturbed the stable nucleus” (laughing). And that is exactly what's going on in this opera.

We're in a period of ridiculously prolonged childhood. Strangely, these global warming issues are reaching right into the heart of that protracted childhood. The infantile consumer says I want this, this, and this. And nobody wants to say: you have to be responsible if you're going to want that.

Also, everyone should read more poetry. It lets people be more human. And it gets behind people's public comments. Anything that anybody says for attribution is usually about one-tenth of what they're thinking. Poetry goes into everything that was not for attribution, and everything that was unspeakable.

BAS: Some of our readers have had parents who were involved in the Manhattan Project. And many more are fairly well versed in the accounts of the time. Which stories did you find most helpful and most interesting–even those which didn't find their way into the libretto?

SELLARS: My regrets are not having more of the extraordinary Chicago people who were involved in the Manhattan Project. They should have operas devoted to them. I had to focus on the J. Robert Op-penheimer, Robert Wilson, Edward Teller triangle and re-triangulate things from there to articulate the debate among the scientists. And of course, Leo Szilard and James Franck are not on stage, although their words are very present. I intended to go much further with Gen. Leslie Groves and the whole security apparatus. I also intended to have an epilogue of the phone conversation with Groves two weeks after Hiroshima, where he's sure that the Japanese are faking the devastation, that it's all propaganda. He calls a doctor at the Oak Ridge, Tennessee, facility and asks, do Japanese have the same blood that white people have? Anyway, a bunch of that stuff just didn't make it in. We were unable to get past the moment of the detonation.

And we already have two and half hours of opera. I wanted to get details of General Groves's family in there, because to me everything is measured except the human cost, as usual. And what we do in opera is talk about the human cost. Groves's wife, Jean, suffered a mental collapse, and he forced her to go to work in a department store to earn the money to pay for her therapy sessions.

The human detail is so shattering, and those for me are atomic-level questions. It's just a little atom, but when it splits the impact is overwhelming. Tracing those kinds of tiny things are huge. For example, everybody at Los Alamos was having babies. Groves was upset that they had to enlarge the maternity ward there. It's a stunning image to me: To spend the day and half the night working on the largest instrument of mass killing in human history, and then to go home and hold your newborn baby. That was the experience of almost every one of these physicists.

And that's why on stage I have the image of Catherine Oppenheimer, this little baby, right below the bomb. These two things are what's being produced.

The audience has the advantage of knowing much more than the characters. We know what happened next, and they don't. But, of course, most of the audience doesn't know that the little baby we have on stage the entire second act will commit suicide at the age of 21.

BAS: What were some of the limitations you had in writing the opera?

SELLARS: Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird's American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy ofj. Robert Oppenheimer came out after I wrote Doctor Atomic. They were able to bring forward so much of the life questions that had been obscure in previous sources.

Oppenheimer is one of those elusive beings who didn't himself leave a record. And so, we are left to guess and extrapolate from his behavior. You have to ask which side is he on at certain moments. You're just shocked. And you don't know what kind of pact he had with Groves, but clearly they were engaged in some form of mutual protection. That's a very complicated relationship, the bottom of which I don't think we'll ever quite see. Oppenheimer is too complex an individual to ever be explained away in psychological platitudes. There's something so extraordinary going on in this person that he will remain elusive, which is why he's absolutely the stuff of Hamlet and Oedipus Rex–an overwhelming figure of dramatic history who we will be arguing about as long as there is civilization.

A lot of the historical records about Los Alamos treat it as a Mom and Pop story without acknowledging the larger consequences that are clearly at stake. This is one of the first projects in human history that was utterly born in the era of propaganda, in which every aspect of it has been so propagandized that even the scientists internalized the made-for-the-movies image of what they were all doing. Much of it sounds like a bad Frank Capra movie. And that's one of the reasons I needed the audience to see the Oppenheimers' hunger for Baudelaire and for the Bhagavad Gita, to have some way to describe the scope of what they were undertaking.

Some of the classified surveillance material is also interesting. What the minutes of Oppenheimer's meetings in Stetson's office indicated that Oppenheimer said is slightly different from other indications. And those discrepancies are startling. And, as always, most of us wish we could have been a little more admirable in the clinch. And sometimes we just weren't. And so there are moments when you want Oppie to be a little more heroic, and he just isn't. He's very human.

BAS: What part of the scientific achievement at Los Alamos impressed you most?

SELLARS: What's so powerful about making the bomb was that you could have done it in your garage. The work at Los Alamos was total hands-on science. People were doing experiments of such overwhelming consequences, but with materials that were unbelievably primitive, in very crude conditions. And they were required to work in those conditions to achieve an accuracy measurable to a small fraction of a micron. For me it's the last moment before technology looks like technology. It was the last time that science looked like something that people made with their hands. I'm very touched by the hands-on quality of it. And I tried to put that on stage. Science is so shiny now that, again, most people feel that it's a world they can't enter.

BAS: How, then, can we invite this shiny science into the mainstream world?

SELLARS: We can ask scientists to have another set of skills–to reflect in a larger way, and overlap with the humanities. And that's what makes physicist Victor Weisskopf so compelling. His reflections about science play in a wider human context, and not just in the mechanics of what it is we're doing and trying to accomplish. That kind of science writing is very rare. Also, Robert Wilson was an extraordinary figure: His scientific and moral stature were in synch. You feel honored to be able to partake of the life of human beings who fully empower themselves, and do it with such decency and humility. At the end of the day, one is very grateful to come back to a certain level of common sense, a certain level of decency. That's increasingly one of the most difficult aspects of our hyper-specialized period of history. People are in such extreme specialization that basic common sense questions get occluded or preempted in many cases. Besides, there are a lot of questions about life on Earth that do not require an advanced degree.

BAS: Were you ever considering that Op-penheimer would not be the central figure of the opera?

SELLARS: The San Francisco Opera was doing a season of Faust operas, and its then-general director, Pamela Rosenberg wanted to commission a new Faust opera from John Adams. I heard that a candidate for Faust was Oppenheimer. The initial idea was: Act One–1945, Act Two–1954. And I'll never forget the meeting all of us had in Rosenberg's office. Our librettist, poet Alice Goodman [who later left the project], said: “I'm sorry but this is not a question of Faust. At the end of his life Faust signed away his immortal soul and lost it. Robert Oppenheimer discovered that he had an immortal soul.”

One of the things that's so interesting about the night of the Trinity test, was that Oppenheimer was able to quote the Bhagavad Gita and have that sense of being God-like as the father of the atomic bomb. But then he realized his utter helplessness in front of the simplest things. We are masters of the universe, but we can't stop the rain.

Now we'll have to work on the sequel, which will be set in 1954. It will focus on the Bravo test in the South Pacific's Bikini Atoll, and what was going on simultaneously in Washington hearing rooms. It's a crucial point: Oppenheimer being stripped of his security clearance, Teller emerging as the director of the hydrogen bomb efforts, and the most powerful and toxic aboveground test in history. I'm also interested in putting the Pacific Island cultures next to this big science and the occupation of the U.S. Navy. Then we'll eventually have two operas on this topic that will follow these people when they were young and relatively unknown. And then when they're the most famous people on Earth in 1954. Oppenheimer's star has fallen, the entire nuclear industrial apparatus is firmly in place, and the last voices of caution calling for some kind of balance, have finally been eliminated. And these two operas could be done like Hector Berlioz's Les Troy ens, a kind of marathon that would tell the tale of a generation.

BAS: People left the theater after Mozart's operas singing his arias. What do you want the audience to do as they walk out of Doctor Atomic?

SELLARS: We live in an age where everything is so heavily propagandized and organized to convince you of something and to make you buy something. So that's one thing as an artist I'm proud not to do. Around 4,000 people will leave the performance with 4,000 different experiences and that's wonderful. My job is not to tell you what to think, it's just to make you think. It's to say, you must think. What you must think is up to you. I suspect the acquaintance with the opera will send people back into some of the history, and will also send people to ask: Well, where do we stand right now? I hope a lot of people will read the Oppenheimer biography, American Prometheus. And I hope they will also read The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger by Jonathan Schell. As artists, we can only pique peoples' interest, and make people hungry for more. We're not trying to put closure on the topic, we're trying to open the topic. That's our achievement.

Supplementary Material

Letter from Gen. Leslie Groves to J. Robert Oppenheimer

Supplementary Material

Eyewitness Account of the Trinity Test