The New Yorker: Oliver Sacks Gets an Opera

“It’s like a fairy tale, the whole thing,” the composer Tobias Picker said the other day, standing in a Boston rehearsal studio. He was presiding over a run-through of an opera that he adapted from “Awakenings,” the 1973 book by his late friend the neurologist Oliver Sacks. The story, about a group of patients immobilized by encephalitis lethargica in a Bronx hospital in the sixties, had already inspired a Harold Pinter play and an Oscar-nominated film. The opera’s East Coast première is this week, at the Huntington Theatre.

Picker, sixty-eight, has a Roman nose and salt-and-pepper curls, and he made notes on his score as the cast rehearsed a prologue set in a hospital dayroom. Three of the warehoused patients were being maneuvered in wheelchairs, singing softly, clutching at thin lap blankets, and occasionally convulsing. Twenty chorus members surrounded them, recounting the story of Sleeping Beauty in a sombre lilt: “Our days fade into weeks and years. / Your time is not like time to us. / We all cry unseen tears.”

“Sleeping Beauty was actually a very tragic story,” Picker said. “We based this on the Grimms’ version, which was much darker than in Disney.” When the piano stopped, a mezzo-soprano singing the part of a patient named Miriam reminded the cast to lock the wheelchairs. “Don’t let me roll,” she said.

Picker met Sacks at a dinner party in the early nineties, having engineered an introduction so that he could get the doctor’s opinion on his own tics. He has had Tourette’s syndrome since childhood, although it wasn’t diagnosed until he was in his thirties. Nervous before Sacks’s arrival that night, Picker took some Valium, which blunted his symptoms. He was dismayed to learn from a friend that, in the elevator after the dinner, Sacks dismissed him as a “negligible case.”

“I felt very hurt, because Oliver was really only interested in interesting cases,” Picker said. Sacks wasn’t persuaded until years later, when Picker showed him a video reel, but by then the men had become mutual muses. In his book “Musicophilia,” Sacks described the curious disappearance of Picker’s tics when he worked on music: “I have watched him as he sits almost motionless for hours, orchestrating one of his études.” Picker credits Sacks with helping him relieve his long-held shame. “I learned to survive with his help,” Picker said at the rehearsal.

In the opera, Sacks is depicted as a kind of fairy-tale prince, restoring his catatonic patients to their previous states, if only temporarily, with the help of a “miracle drug” called L-dopa. Picker and his librettist—the novelist and neuroradiologist Aryeh Lev Stollman, who is also his husband—worked into the story a parallel awakening for the doctor himself. Sacks didn’t come out publicly until a few months before his death, in 2015, in his last book, the memoir “On the Move: A Life.” Portraying Sacks as a gay man was important to Picker. “I had written five operas about heterosexuals,” he said, before pausing to correct himself: “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” an opera in three acts that Picker adapted from Roald Dahl’s book, included a lesbian love story about two pieces of farm equipment. “Agnes the Digger and Mavis the Tractor fall in love,” he said.

“Awakenings” doesn’t allow Sacks such a happy ending. After a tender, private encounter with a male nurse, he withdraws to the closet. “I am no longer the man I was,” Sacks sings at the end, “but I have not truly awakened yet.” His patients, too, revert to their immobile states after the brief success of L-dopa. In Act II, one patient shrieks, “That L-dopa, it’s Hell-dopa!”

At the rehearsal, Picker and his director, James Robinson, had the group run a scene in which Sacks persuades his surly superior, Dr. Podsnap, to use L-dopa on a test patient. Members of the chorus rolled a blackboard scrawled with the words “morbidity & mortality” onstage. The Sacks character strode in carrying a motorcycle helmet.

“Podsnap is gonna give him a little attitude back, so play that up,” Robinson told the singer. “Sacks is not one of the guys.” He urged him to summon his inner “motorcycle daddy.”

“When he was living in California, in the early sixties, he was definitely a muscle-beach motorcycle daddy, as grandma used to say,” Robinson added. “He wrote about his sexual exploits—but then there was a period when he was completely celibate.”

“He claimed thirty-five years,” Picker said. “But he did tend to exaggerate.”

On an iPhone, Picker pulled up an image of the young Sacks from the cover of his final book, looking hunky astride his motorcycle. Picker had first seen the photo ten years ago, at Sacks’s apartment, in Sheridan Square, during a photo shoot for a ballet version of “Awakenings” that Picker wrote before the opera. “I was, like, ‘Oliver, that’s you? You were really hot,’ ” he recalled. Sacks sighed, replying, “If only I had known.”

Published in the print edition of the February 27, 2023, issue, with the headline “Double Awakening.” Read More.