The World after The Bomb

The world ends with the threat of an international nuclear holocaust and begins with the Garden of Eden as an idyllic, diverse, penguin-infiltrated, middle American town meeting. It is the world according to the International WOW Company's The Bomb. I first encountered The Bomb—a four-hour-long, 27-cast member kaleidoscope of history, culture, and personal relationships auteured by IWC artistic director/writer Josh Fox—during the first run of the show, 28 February to 17 March 2002, at the CSV Auditorium in the Flamboyan Theatre at the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural Center on New York's Lower East Side. The Bomb's first run offered an intensely intimate reflection on the post-9/11 life of the city's shocked population. The play's second incarnation, 24 May through 14 July 2002 at the same location, still focused on the aftermath, but like many New Yorkers, it had moved past the initial impact and was beginning to question the endemic xenophobia and paranoia running rampant in the U.S. during the months after the Twin Towers came down.

WOW's staged reenactment of 9/11 and the day after suggests not only that the attack was a product of a history of violence that began with the invention of the atomic bomb, but also takes very seriously the threat of nuclear war that has emerged as the "War Against Terrorism" moves from Afghanistan to Iraq. These questions are embedded in the retelling of the history of the development of the atomic bomb in the 1940s by American scientists working on the Manhattan Project under the leadership of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer is portrayed by IWC's associate artistic director/cowriter, Aya Ogawa, a Japanese American woman.

Dressed in a man's suit and hat, Oppenheimer, or "Oppy," as he is referred to in The Bomb, enters late in the first act. He offers a monologue of his life, beginning with the split he feels within himself throughout his childhood and early adolescence, and concluding with the way this parallels the splitting of the atom:

OPPY:

Ask yourself if you could have stopped your own birth. There is no answer. I never asked to be born. I have never been comfortable as a human being; that is no secret. But obviously, I had no choice. The same is true for the atomic bomb. You cannot suppress ideas; you cannot stop their march forward into invention. And you cannot contain them once they have been born. [...]

I stand before you as a shattered man. I have been exiled from the government I fought to preserve. I have been humiliated in the press. I have been branded as a communist by the powers that be. And I have been reviled as a monster by people from all over the world. Never has my existence as a human being been more uncomfortable. But I find that the myth is true: at the bottom of my Pandora's box there is hope. Our hand has been forced, by God or by our own curiosity, whichever it is, whether we like it or not. And I do not regret asking. (Fox 2001a)

The act concludes as Oppenheimer takes a bite from the poisoned apple and then offers it to the audience, suggesting both his knowledge-laden exit from the Garden and an invitation to the spectator to join him in his exile.

Formally, The Bomb is nothing new. It is linear and essentially realistic. But it does work very hard to shed new light on the theatre as a place where actors and audiences can consider "the intrinsic relationship between personal agency and what's socially important" (Fox 2001b). The International WOW Company is a six-year-old intercultural theatre company whose operations and 60-person membership extends from New York to Thailand, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Japan. While the IWC's aims are political, founder Fox and his collaborators do not engage in activist theatre. Instead, they choose to address the political through the personal—creating scripts that, as New York Times reviewer, Bruce Weber, wrote of IWC...