Edge: Making 'Awakenings' Sing — Creators Talk of Opera from Oliver Sacks' Bestseller
Both a neurologist and a globally celebrated author, Dr. Oliver Sacks lived in the closet for most of his life, emerging only shortly before his death in 2015. But even before that he was out to people who mattered to him: His partner, Bill Hayes, of course, but also his friends Tobias Picker, a celebrated composer whose work includes the operas "Emmeline," "Fantastic Mr. Fox," and "An American Tragedy," and Picker's life partner, Dr. Aryeh Lev Stollman, a neuroradiologist and prize-winning author of gay-themed fiction, with three novels and a collection of short stories to his credit.
From that friendship — and from the four-decade-plus committed union between Picker and Stollman — an adaptation of Dr. Sacks' most iconic work, "Awakenings," has come to fruition. "Awakenings" the book is a collection of case studies that Sacks wrote about a number of patients suffering from the so-called "sleeping sickness," encephalitis lethargica, that afflicted thousands of people worldwide in the 1920s. The book's thrilling core premise, though — and the focal point of its 1990 film adaptation — was what happened when Dr. Sacks administered levodopa, also known as L-dopa, to seemingly-catatonic patients in Beth Abrahams Hospital, in New York, who were suffering from the malady. As the title suggests, they woke up... which is to say, they came to life, able to move, speak, and interact with the world like anyone else. The treatment's curative effects were tragically short-lived, but the story remains a poignant classic of medical literature.