Opera News: Awakenings’ “Kaleidoscopic Score Mirrors The Revived Patients’ Internal States As They Grapple With A World Both Alien And Familiar”
AFTER A YEAR of enforced hibernation followed by an abbreviated outdoor season, Opera Theatreof Saint Louis, known for its curation of new works, returned to its full festival production schedule with not one, but two premieres. Originally planned for 2020, Tobias Picker’s Awakenings is an adaptation of Dr. Oliver Sacks’s 1973 book of the same name, which chronicles his pharmaceutical experiments with survivors of sleeping sickness. Stewart Wallace’s Harvey Milk, postponed from 2021, explores the life of the country’s first openly gay politician, assassinated by a homophobic rival soon after taking office. Carmen and The Magic Flute completed the slate (all OTSL’s productions are sung in English), with all four works united by the underlying theme of—if not awakening, precisely—liberation.
The Spanish flu was not the only epidemic raging one hundred years ago; from 1917-1927, encephalitis lethargica sent its victims into extended slumber. Years later, many of those who survived developed life- altering symptoms related to Parkinsonism, living in a suspended state of frozen animation, hearing and understanding but incapable of responding. In 1969, Sacks used a new Parkinson’s drug, L-DOPA, to reanimate a group of these patients at Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx. Sacks’s successes, which he documented as a series of case studies, were temporary but significant. Sacks and Picker became lifelong friends after the doctor diagnosed the composer’s Tourette’s Syndrome, and it was Sacks’s idea to adapt his work as an opera.