Peter Sellars: The United States is coming close to censorship

The difficult poor John Adamss The Gospel According to the Other Mary at English National Opera, London. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

Their voices are almost completely missing from the Bible, yet it was women who were closest to Jesus in his final days. The Gospel According to the Other Mary, a new opera by John Adams, tells the story of that tumultuous time through what those women saw and experienced. In addition to the scriptures, the libretto draws on work by 20th-century writers, including Primo Levi and the journalist and activist Dorothy Day. Through their words, we are able to look at Mary and her sister Martha in much more depth and also tell the story of todaysdispossessed and disempowered generation.

You could take the piece in any number of directions, but for me therewas only one way. The production I am directing for English National Opera is set today, in Los Angeless Skid Row. Mary and Martha have opened a house of hospitality for homeless and unemployed women, which survives on small donations andsmall miracles.

Day, whose words form much of the libretto, was one of the founders of the Catholic Worker Movement and its newspaper. In the early 1930s, during the Great Depression, she opened the first soup kitchens in the Bowery and the Lower East Side of New York. Theywere for homeless people who had lost their jobs and were desperate. These were educated people, but like today there were no jobs. TheNew Yorker has called her asaint for the Occupy era and she was deeply radical: the church she believed in wasthe church of immigrants, the church of the poor. It wasnt enough to give someone a meal, she said, you had to give them a sense of what it is tofeel whole. Jesus, she said, was not on Earth to be with the decent poor. He was here to be with the deranged, the drunken, the degraded, the difficult.

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Adams and I responded strongly to this idea. Today, on both sides of the Atlantic, we have abandoned the poor and openly attacked the most vulnerable in society. But what also appealed to us was Days rawness and honesty about the struggle of trying to actually live your convictions, and not just have them as nice ideas. She was arrested many times, the first occasion at the age of 20 for picketing the White House on behalf of womens suffrage. The last arrest came when she was in her 70s, protesting for the rights of farm workers. This felt telling: in the US, the next generations struggle will be over food, who grows it and how.

It was important for us to connect the opera to the plight of migrant workers in California and across the US, still the poorest and worst-treated employees in the country. The immigration law is used to provide a workforce of slave labour. The conditions they work under are obscene: the strawberries they pick are covered in pesticides, meaning the women have miscarriages and shorter lives. But if anybody complains, the immigration department is contacted and theyre deported.

For me, the point about sacred material is that its not something that happened 2,000 years ago. Its contemporary. The great painters Rembrandt, Rogier van der Weyden, Bruegel depicted their own times. The events they portray ask us where we stand, who we are, what were doing right now. Bruegels religious scenes have people working in the fields, squabbling, eating, going about their daily business. I find the same sense of immediacy in the Bach passions. Theyre about what we did this morning and what were doing tonight, and the values they represent are deeply attached to universal questions of justice, reconciliation, restoration, suffering, illness, recovery and resurrection. These are challenging issues, but if were not willing to be challenged, were missing out on what life is asking of us.

Opera can make such a challenge beautiful. Even if some of its truths are difficult, Adamss music is ravishing, taking you deep into a place you would otherwise hesitate to go. Music is not about itself. Its about everything else we think, feel and care about. What I get to do is put music on a stage, and thereby peoples lives and hopes, too. We all need these mirrors, though we dont always appreciate what we see in them. In fact, the usual thing to do is blame the mirror. But its the artists job to reflect back to society things that dont always get seen with sharpness or moral intensity.

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Peter Sellars: The United States is coming close to censorship