Re-Awakenings: A New Opera By Tobias Picker and Aryeh Lev Stollman Opens In St. Louis
THIS MONTH'S PREMIERE of Awakenings, at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, will no doubt have a resonance beyond what was originally intended. The opera—by composer Tobias Picker and librettist Aryeh Lev Stollman, who are spouses as well as collaborators—was scheduled to open at OTSL in June 2020. But the Covid pandemic has pushed its unveiling back two years, to a time when the concept of "awakenings" has acquired new meaning.
The work is an adaptation of Oliver Sacks's 1973 book, describing his breakthrough treatment of a group of patients in a Bronx hospital afflicted with encephalitis lethargica, a.k.a. "sleeping sickness." They had lived for decades in a dissociated state, neither dead nor exactly alive, but Sacks's radical use of the drug L-dopa "awakened" them. Its effects, though, proved unsustainable, and the patients eventually settled back into their "sleep" state.
Awakenings had been complete at the time of its postponement. Not a note has changed since then but the world has. The history of Sacks's patients has acquired fresh relevance. They contracted the disease in the years between 1916 and 1927, when a mysterious sleeping-sickness pandemic swept through the world. "Awakenings has a whole new layer of meaning," Picker says. "Before this, a pandemic was just something you read about in books. So I think that, sitting in the audience, we'll identify with it in a different way than if this hadn't happened."
Stallman brings a physician's viewpoint to the issue of pandemics: he is not just a writer but a neuroradiologist at New York's Mount Sinai Hospital. He speculates that Awakenings's audience will now bring a heightened awareness of the efforts of healthcare professionals. "The patients received an extraordinary amount of loving care from healthcare workers-not just the doctors but the nurses and the orderlies," Stallman says. "And we see that now, the healthcare community has risen to the occasion of the pandemic. You have to have a lot of love in your heart to help people navigate their illness and try to make them whole."