New opera explores MK-ULTRA

There’s a juncture in Evan Hause’s new opera, Man: Biology of a Fall, when Army chemist Frank Olson confronts the popular magician John Mullholland. These characters are based on historical figures: Olson served in the Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, Maryland, around the time of the Korean War, participating in biological weapons research including the infamous MKULTRA mind-control experiments. As Hause said in an interview, Mulholland “was famous in his day for his books and pamphlets, and employed by the CIA to teach sleight-of-hand tricks so they could slip LSD into people’s drinks.” In their scene, Olson (played by tenor Steven Ebel) acknowledges having read the magician’s tracts, and the latter (countertenor Jeffrey Mandelbaum) replies: “Maybe you’ll learn something else today.” “Like why you’re working for the CIA,” Olson counters. Mulholland retorts with soaring embellishments, “Aren’t you?” The angry, anxious doctor has to acknowledge that he doesn’t know.

The opera apparently hinges around the question of whether Olson killed himself by hurling himself off a balcony while high on LSD, or in a more sinister, conspiratorial take, was pushed:

Olson’s colleagues had argued over the cause of the Army chemist’s death, and the family began investigating the remaining evidence. “It was Rumsfeld and Cheney who drew up the statement that the family signed in 1975. Cheney said, ‘We can’t have them starting up suits,’ and $750,000 was offered once they signed away the right to prosecute, with Cheney advising Rumsfeld, who passed it on to [then President] Ford.... Back in the 1950s, Olson’s case had made it into the training manual for the Massad, Hause said, as the textbook case for concluding a murder: a blow to the head, then thrown out the window. “After rehearsal last night, I went for the first time to the hotel room in the Hotel Pennsylvania [then the New York Statler Hotel], Room 1018A, and went immediately to the window, put my head on it and looked down at the Seventh Avenue sidewalk. The fall didn’t kill him immediately—the watchman who found him down there said he died still trying to say something.”

Creepy! True or not, sounds like the makings for one heck of a wild opera, especially this description of the end of the first act:

Olson, in his job with the Army, had been told of tortures of Nazi prisoners and clandestine experiments in Korea. “At the beginning of the opera,” Hause said, “he expresses doubts to the British researcher Sargeant, who was sort of the Timothy Leary of Britain and who wrote a book on mind control. Sargeant gets on the phone to a mysterious presence, and Olson’s escapade begins. The final scene of the first act is the largest; we call it the Lodge Scene, for the place where they do LSD dosing, and it turns into a Walpurgisnacht, with Olson getting dosed and wanting out, but the Army won’t let him out.” By the time Gottlieb, the mastermind, appears and announces that he has a solution, “the sand,” as Hause put it, “is running out of the hourglass.”

Too bad the show only ran four nights, and generated no YouTube footage. Don't these people realize if you don't document your work on the intertubes, it doesn't really exist?