Heather Christian, MacArthur’s Newest Genius

A few days before Heather Christian was announced as one of the recipients of this year’s MacArthur “genius” grants, she wandered through the glass cube of the Rose Center for Earth and Space, expounding on supernovas, dark matter, and Oort clouds. With her bleached hair, elfin frame, and oversized sweatshirt, not to mention her ease with the niceties of the cosmos, she could have been mistaken for an Astronomy 101 teaching assistant, but in fact she is a forty-four-year-old composer, librettist, and performer, whose ineffable musical theatre (not musical-theatre) pieces have won her a cult following. Christian, who had been given a heads-up about the MacArthur Fellowship, said, “I always held hope in my heart that one day this would happen. But that ‘one day’ to me was, like, when I’m sixty-five, and I’ve written enough weird shows to where they’re, like, ‘You know what? You’ve kept at it. Have a cookie.’ ”

She was taking a break from tech rehearsals for the latest production of one of those shows, “Oratorio for Living Things,” at the Signature Theatre. Inspired by, as she puts it, “the three Carls”—Sagan, Orff, and (Carlo) Rovelli—“Oratorio” is a musical meditation, for twelve singers, on time, memory, and what it means to be human on a turbulent planet at the edge of cataclysm. “Time is as mysterious and subjective as the concept of God and the concept of ourselves,” she said, with a twang that revealed her Natchez, Mississippi, upbringing. “We can’t understand it because we are made of it.” She has a darting, birdlike keenness, and as she weaved through a pack of slower-moving fellow-humans into the Hayden Planetarium, for a showing of “Encounters in the Milky Way” (narrated by Pedro Pascal), she went on, “I think I’ve always been chasing mystery—looking into questions that are not built to be answered. And that just tickles me. I think that’s part of being alive.”

Inside the auditorium, the lights went down, and, overhead, laser-projected dust clouds from exploding stars formed new galaxies and the Milky Way collided and started to merge with the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy. “We are a product of cosmic encounters,” Pascal purred through the speakers.

Afterward, another attendee reported a sense of awe much like the one he’d felt as a teen-ager during Laserium shows set to Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon,” after a few bong hits. Christian reacted with the sang-froid of a professional. “The whole third act of ‘Oratorio’ is about collision and cosmic violence and how we measure time in space,” she said. “So, yeah, if we’re going to define time as a collection of encounters or collisions, how do you let that be a frame over what’s happening on the quantum level? And how do you let that be a frame over how you’re living your life?”

As she made her way through the Hall of the Universe, offering a stream of commentary, it was clear that her scientific knowledge had been braided with a hunger for creative expression and religious ritual since her childhood in the Deep South. A self-described “peculiar and not very popular” girl, she wrote poetry about ghosts and angels, played the piano, and served as the musical director at her church, while also starting a “Save the World” club and obsessively collecting rocks. (In front of a volcano exhibit, she mentioned a song in her show about the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79, and said, “We are overdue for a planetary revision, for another great, late heavy bombardment.”) At N.Y.U., she augmented her experimental-theatre curriculum with courses in physics, astronomy, and quantum mechanics.

While writing “Oratorio,” Christian was determined to make its scientific scaffolding solid. (She’s delighted that the Cambridge University physicist Suchitra Sebastian came to the first preview and returned for the next two performances.) But her aims are more than academic. “The only way that I understand it is from a poetic standpoint—I am not a scientist,” she said. “But I see these patterns and these themes that sort of repeat themselves as extended metaphors across multiple scales, and that is best represented musically. You can do counterpoint, you can do fugue, and you can do canon, repetition—all of that stuff. And even for people who don’t pick up on that, I want them to feel it emotionally and realize it in their bodies.”

On her way out of the Rose Center, she stopped in the planetarium gift shop, where she noted a T-shirt that read “Made of Stars.” She laughed and said, “That’s it right there. We’re all just bumping around and into each other, and we do have a natural proclivity towards volatility because we are forged from hydrogen, helium, and all the same shit as the stars.”

Since learning of the MacArthur, she’d been reflecting on the seemingly random collisions that landed her here, and on how, as she sees it, the main prize, along with validation and financial freedom, is time. She has at least thirteen projects in the works, including operas based on the myths of Dido and Aeneas and Gilgamesh, an adaptation of Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying,” a musical based on Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time,” a collaboration with Taylor Mac about Clarence Thomas, and a double album with her band Heather Christian and the Arbornauts. “And then I’m adapting the Book of Revelation, but I don’t know how that’s a show,” she said. “Yet.” ♦