‘ARKHIPOV’ tells the story of an unsung hero who saved the world from nuclear warfare

Peter Knell and Stephanie Fleischmann’s “ARKHIPOV,” which had its concert-style world premiere as a part of Jacaranda’s music series at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City on October 21, tells the true story of Vasili Arkhipov — a somewhat unknown but heroic figure in history.

The performance opens on a stage with most of the cast shrouded in darkness. All the words sung out to the audience — known as the opera’s libretto — are projected on a screen that also reads “1962.”

A small chorus of men stand at attention and state their names and naval ranks out to the audience: “Semyon Penkov, Seaman, 890 roentgen. Valery Kháritonov, Seaman, 935 roentgen. Evgeny Kashénkov, Starshina, 2nd class, 845 roentgen. Boris Korchílov, Lieutenant, 5400 rem.” The list goes on.

The scenes then switch. The screen reading “1962″ has jumped ahead — now, it’s “1998.” Olga, Arkhipov’s wife, is being interrogated by a silent nameless Russian officer. Although he has no lines, it’s implied that he is questioning her on her husband’s actions — referring to his time on the submarine B-59.

Suddenly, the scene shifts to the B-59 just as it’s about to submerge, “Bound for points unknown,” as the crew sings out.

The next two hours are spent in the pressure-cooker tension of the submarine cabin as the crew, led by the vocally powerful Edward Parks III as co-captain Arkhipov, sets off toward Cuba. The crew members battle through rough waters, illnesses, the possibility of running out of food and the fact that they must harbor a “special weapon” of mass destruction — all under the careful eye of Arkhipov and his co-captain, one of the story’s many villains.

After months in the increasingly hot and low-on-drinking-water submarine, the crew is at its wits end. A tipping point arrives: They’ve lost all radio communications with life above the surface of the sea and they’re being fired at for reasons unknown. A fight ensues and the men violently argue that they should fire their massive weapon.

Arkhipov, the kind-but-firm mediator of this motley crew, stops the launch of the weapon. Unbeknownst to him, he has saved the world from nuclear warfare.

Arkhipov not-so-famously stood up against a fellow officer and blocked a mistaken decision to fire torpedoes at vessels belonging to the United States. The U.S. was trying to signal to the Russians that they could come to the surface, but the crew mistook it as an attack. Arkhipov was the singular member of the crew who was able to stop the launch. As the New Yorker put it, “Had the torpedo been fired, the United States would have retaliated with nuclear weapons.”

The opera’s story, although somewhat fictionalized, is based upon a combination of Olga’s testimony and reports on the incident from the Russian government, as well as some actual letters found at the National Security Archive from a sailor to his wife. This sets up the opera’s framing as the audience watches time jump back and forth between the 1990s and when the incident happened in 1962.

As Knell tells it, the idea to turn this story into an opera came when he read Arkhipov’s story in the New Yorker, which detailed every time that we came close to a nuclear Armageddon.

“It was basically a paragraph that … actually doesn’t even say the name of the captain or the sub or anything. It just said it was this one sub that was maybe the most dangerous of all [during the Cuban Missile Crisis],” Knell recalled. “That was enough to pique my interest.”

Knell then connected with Fleischmann, who had previously delved into the intersection of contemporary politics and opera with her piece “The Long Walk” (based upon Iraq veteran Brian Castner’s memoir of the same name), to write the libretto. At Knell’s offer, Fleischmann said she felt “hungry to do more of this work.”

Considering how long Arkhipov’s heroic actions were kept a secret from the world, as well as just how relevant the piece seems now — this was something they both felt they needed to write.

“I hate to use the word serendipitous because it’s not something we want, so it’s the opposite of serendipitous. But timely, yes,” Knell said.

The obvious comparison is the current tension and military action between Russia and Ukraine, Knell points out, but the examples of times the world has almost ended are frighteningly innumerous. Hiroshima, Chernobyl, India and Pakistan, North Korea — all pose threats to the future of the planet, Fleischmann said. This is such a pressing issue that the real Arkhipov was posthumously awarded the “Future of Life” award, which goes to individuals who “without having received much recognition at the time, have helped make today dramatically better than it may otherwise have been” and are provided by the Future of Life Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Additionally, the fact that so often the causes of these incidents are based around a lack of understanding and listening is something that Knell wants audiences to take away. As both Knell and Fleishmann put it, communication is one of the themes that permeates throughout the show.

“The opera gestures at our current crisis of leadership,” Knell writes in the show’s program. “With more and more countries sliding toward autocracy and belligerence, now more than ever we need an Arkhipov to be our global Ark.”