“Body Burden” at the Adobe Theatre.

Reviewed by Linda López McAlister

Playwrights who write about the development of nuclear weapons and the aftermath seem to like to invoke ghosts. Michael Frayn called up the ghosts of Niels Bohr and Werner Heissenberg in his play Copenhagen about the race to develop the atomic bomb. Now New Mexico playwright Dale Dunn has conjured up the ghost of J. Robert Oppenheimer in her new play Body Burden that had its world premiere last weekend at the Adobe Theater in Albuquerque. Perhaps they do this because the moral dilemmas that this subject matter poses are so enormous that our struggles with them will last into eternity.

Body Burden explores these dilemmas in relation to a little known program carried out by scientists at various atomic research facilities in the 1960s that sought to determine “the Maximum Permissible Body Burden” for various radioactive materials on the human body. According to playwright Dunn, it has been documented that some of these experiments were conducted on children growing up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where she grew up. The program is called “Project Sunshine.”

The play’s protagonist, Kate Pendleton, left Los Alamos after high school, and now returns twenty-five years later—after having had a miscarriage, a failed marriage, a cancerous thyroid gland and finding herself unable to continue her career as a journalist. On her journey back to New Mexico, she stops at night in the desert and cries out in despair, thereby conjuring up two spirits, the ghost of J. Robert Oppenheimer and a lost, time-traveling, Girl Scout from 1966 who could have been her at that age. What she finds when she returns to her mother’s home in Los Alamos are gut-wrenching revelations about her parents and her old high school friends, all of whom are haunted in varying ways by their relationships to the work of the laboratory. These revelations and her interactions with Oppenheimer and the lost Girl Scout begin to help her make sense of the course of her life and, possibly, provide a way to move on.

Director Lou Clark has done an enormously skillful job of bringing this complex and thought-provoking play to the stage. She has cast some of Albuquerque’s finest actors and they give moving and truthful performances throughout. Laurie Lister as Kate Pendleton and Vernon Poitras as the ghost of J. Robert Oppenheimer created what I thought were particularly engrossing and insightful characterizations. The scenic and lighting design by Leonard Madrid and the beautifully realized sound design by Clareann Despain added immeasurably to the overall effectiveness of the production.
Body Burden is a play that will continue to haunt you long after the lights go out and the audience leaves the theater. This production at the Adobe Theater that runs through October 7th may be its first, but I predict that it will not be its last. It makes an important contribution to our ongoing understanding of the human condition, for good or ill, and deserves the widest possible audience.