Unholy Trinity

Peter Sellars rips into Doctor Atomic's system.

By Robert Avila

IT'S THE NIGHT of July 15, 1945, at the Trinity test site in the desert of Alamogordo, NM. Chief scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer (Gerald Finely) and his immediate boss, Gen. Leslie Groves (Eric Owens), are standing around together only a few final hours ahead of the first explosion of an atomic bomb, and talking diets. Kidded by Oppenheimer, the rotund general is giving details of his apparently futile battle with his own waist line.

Groves's pants size may not seem the weightiest of themes for grand opera, but Doctor Atomic – the new work by composer John Adams and director-librettist Peter Sellars, commissioned by San Francisco Opera, whose subject is no less than Los Alamos and the making of the bomb – proceeds by such outrageous juxtapositions of the cataclysmic and the altogether mundane.

History certainly justifies such an approach, and Sellars's found-text libretto is steeped in it. It draws on everything from personal memoirs, letters, transcripts, and formerly classified government documents to the poetry of John Donne, Charles Baudelaire, and Muriel Rukeyser in crafting an odd and intricate narrative that limns the most technical and public of surfaces one minute, and plumbs the most private and universal depths the next.

Inevitably, there's more of the mundane or comic to the above scene. Fat Man and Little Boy were, after all, the unassuming, even affectionate nicknames given to the two bombs dropped on Japan three weeks later. They referred to the distinctive shapes of the weapons, but it's the kind of coincidence the opera gives plenty of room to ponder. Oppenheimer, for his part, was reportedly down to less than 100 pounds by the time of the Trinity test. Meanwhile, Groves had ballooned, and he, the representative of the military and the state apparatus, is the bigger figure in many ways. In view of the power relationship here, you can easily imagine him swallowing the scientist whole.

And yet both men become little more than ciphers when weighed against the two bombs that bear mockingly sinister relations to their mismatched pairing. There's just no tragic hero capable of encompassing the inexorable movement of the machinery itself, the enormous systems of power and control then underway, which makes the Faustian aspects of Oppenheimer's career (well recognized at the time) a dramatic but ultimately imperfect focal point. Dwight Macdonald, writing in September 1945, was among the first to register the operatic potential and limitations of the age when he labeled it "Götterdämmerung without the gods."

But the tacit Faustian tale is only one aspect of Doctor Atomic anyway. This partly explains the fitful success of the opera as drama. It seems to feel the need to decenter Oppenheimer, without breaking free from a certain narrative tether that has the world revolving around him. He has his time center stage – and Finley's aria closing the first of the two acts, "Batter My Heart, Three-Person'd God," is definitely a highlight. But other characters loom nearly as large throughout, including Edward Teller (Richard Paul Fink), Kitty Oppenheimer (Kristine Jepson), the Oppenheimers' Indian maid, Pasqualita (Beth Clayton), and the conscience-stricken young physicist Robert Wilson (Thomas Glenn). In the end, no one person is as crucial to the ac tion as the machinery, which, Teller memorably sings, "has caught us in its trap."

It's not science or intellect or the individual but the dead, hollow triumph of a system that rises over the desert at Trinity. The opera establishes some of this sense of things at the outset, in the haunting soundscape that accompanies and brackets Adams's rolling, lyrical, intensely dynamic score. Before anything happens onstage, a musique concrète passage composed on PowerTools rises up in a chiming of machine talk. For all its harmonic abstraction, it effectively sets the dramatic scene: There's great human intention behind such sounds – drills, electric saws, an airplane gaining altitude – and still, they're devoid of personality. It's only with the crackle of a radio signal that the aural landscape takes on a truly human glow, via a female voice singing a popular song of the era – just a few semigarbled bars' worth, sweet and carefree amid an infinite static, a miraculously aberrant sound.

The effect comes back in modulated form at the end, as the second act's intricate, time-stretching countdown to detonation unexpectedly gives way to an intentional musical anticlimax. The final notes of the opera wash over the prone scientists and personnel filling the stage in a suggestion of quiet awakening. It's at this moment of dawning awareness, in response to the artificial sunrise set off with su ch violence over the desert, that another female voice reaches out over the airwaves. This one speaks in Japanese, addressing us in tones that suggest no awareness of danger. Emanating from Trinity's ground zero, the words might be considered simultaneous with the action onstage, or an echo of its immediate future, or of our own present. Given all we know, including about the Einsteinian relativity of space and time, the voice inevitably comes from several places at once – none of them safe anymore.

'Doctor Atomic' runs through Oct. 22. Fri/14, 8 p.m.; Sun/16, 2 p.m.; Tues/18, 8 p.m.; Oct. 20, 7:30 p.m.; Oct. 22, 8 p.m, War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness, SF. $15-$235. (415) 864-3330, www.sfopera.com.