Kronos Quartet brings "My Lai" to BAM Next Wave

Tenor Rinde Eckert (left) as Hugh Thompson, Jr.
and musician Vân-Ánh Võ in My Lai
(photo: Richard Termine)

On the morning of March 16, 1968, U.S. army soldiers fired upon more than 500 unarmed civilians--elders, children, infants, women, some raped and mutilated--in the South Vietnamese hamlets of My Lai and My Khe. More innocents would have been slaughtered in this Vietnam War atrocity--since known as the My Lai Massacre--were it not for the witness and persistent intervention of a young American helicopter pilot, Hugh Thompson, Jr. His three descents into the chaos, though futile as attempts to halt the killing, ultimately saved lives, including, on his final landing, a young boy rescued from his dead mother's arms.

For Thompson's courageous efforts and his official reports of the massacre, he at first became a pariah in Nixon's America, as much a non-surprise as it is heartbreaking. His story inspired a concise, deeply affecting opera, My Lai, now in its New York premiere run at BAM Harvey Theater for BAM Next Wave. It was composed by Jonathan Berger with a libretto by fiction writer Harriet Scott Chessman for Kronos Quartet, tenor Rinde Eckert and Vân-Ánh Võ, a master performer of traditional Vietnamese string and percussion instruments.

Running at 70 minutes, the work suggests the dissonance between cultures--the flare-ups and gusts of Western strings set against Vân-Ánh Võ's measured, airy and delicate tones. Sounds converge and diverge; their players become factions physically separated by Eckert and the set the way Thompson's chopper, on its second descent, kept murderous soldiers from reaching potential victims. The set at the center of it all depicts a sterile hospital room: ceiling-to-floor white curtains, a couple of chairs, a table covered in prescription bottles. The curtains serve as screens for the ghostly shadowplay of helicopter blades and the gleam of wind-blown grasses. Here Eckert gives voice to an aging Thompson consumed by ugly memories and dying of cancer. The heroic pilot died in 2006.

Once Eckert parts the curtain and emerges before us, haunted and restless, the work maintains tight focus on him; the singer maintains his own tight grip in a performance of exacting force and endurance. He is almost never not singing, compulsively remembering, compulsively reporting, dreaming, desiring escape from the body, desiring, ironically, to share with his remembered young son the beauty of flight. He hallucinates his testimony as a game show.

Once you land, there's no turning back.... You can't just hover.

At one point, the bewildered Thompson asks, "How has this happened?" It's a question with no one good answer--or far too many. It resonates and disturbs as much today, in the Age of Trump, as then, in the Age of Nixon.

Kronos Quartet:
David Harrington (violin), John Sherba (violin), Hank Dutt (viola) and Sunny Yang (cello)

Direction, set design: Mark DeChiazza and Rinde Eckert
Video projection design: Mark DeChiazza
Lighting design: Brian H. Scott

My Lai has one final performance, tonight at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here. For information on other BAM Next Wave events, click here.

BAM Harvey
651 Fulton Street, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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