After a nearly 12-year journey, UCLA Health psychiatrist Dr. Kenneth Wells is set to debut his third and final opera in a trilogy written about the life of famed USC legal scholar Elyn Saks and her journey living with schizophrenia.
Based and named after Saks’ acclaimed memoir, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey through Madness, the three-part opera uses an innovative way to tell Saks’ story.
“All of my operas have three Elyns in them,” said Wells. “There is Elyn who is the person in real time, there is Professor Saks who is able to reflect on her history, and there is the ‘Lady of the Charts’ who is the ‘crazy’ Elyn from her schizophrenia.”
Three free performances of the opera will take place at the UCLA Semel Auditorium from June 27-29 and will also be livestreamed on YouTube.
The third part of the opera, titled “Beyond Recovery,” follows Saks at a turning point in her life from a time of uncertainty and fear following her diagnosis to a story of “love and victory,” Wells said.
After becoming a lawyer, Saks begins training to become a psychoanalyst, which leads to an award-winning career advocating for people living with severe mental illness. Saks also falls in love with and marries law librarian Will Vinet, who becomes a stabilizing force in her life until his death. Saks also battles cancer only to find it to be less stigmatizing than her mental illness.
“She is such a champion that I thought it would be important to share something positive,” said Wells, who is a professor at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior and Fielding School of Public Health. “I love operas that have a positive journey, even if it’s complicated, rather than lead to death. I like operas that tell a story of complexity, and this was a perfect example.”
Wells first met Saks after his wife, psychiatrist M. Christina Benson, had taught for Saks at a psychoanalytic institute and developed a friendship with her.
The operas represent the marriage of Wells’ professional career as a psychiatrist and his lifelong passion for music. Wells was introduced to music at an early age by his family, beginning with piano at two years old, playing as a substitute organist at his Baptist church at age 10, and touring in a church choir throughout Los Angeles in his high school years. His eventual path to his medical career came while he was attending his first opera at age 14 and his appendix suddenly burst. The surgeon who patched him up inspired him to pursue a career in medicine, but his lifelong love of music still carried through.
“I was so busy with my medical life and the research I do,” Wells said. “So when I started working with communities to address depression in south and downtown Los Angeles, people told me they can’t deal with depression unless they deal with it through art. I began doing evaluations of the people that came to the art events. That’s when I thought, ‘I should write my operas now.’”
The Center Cannot Hold: Beyond Recovery is Wells’ fifth original opera. Previous operas have also focused on uplifting stories amid mental health struggles, including the award-winning “Veteran Journeys” and “The First Lady,” his first opera about Eleanor Roosevelt’s grief in the aftermath of her husband’s death.
To attend or watch the livestream of the performance, please register here