David Van Taylor Revives a Late Friend’s Passion Project

To write the libretto, Van Taylor interviewed friends in Livingston’s photographs and strangers affected by them, and created characters who sing their words, such as the Seeker (“You can’t always tell from the photo / Sometimes it was a pain in the ass”), the Curmudgeon (“A blurry photo of two stoned twenty-year-olds in Italy / I bought this box of spaghetti”), and the Curator (“Did we know what we had? . . . New York in those days . . . Grownups away”). The Inventor—who is inspired by Edwin Land, the inventor of the Polaroid, “but also Steve Jobs, and a little Elon Musk thrown in”—sings of invention, technology, and revolutionizing human connection. Van Taylor and Woolf first collaborated on an opera about Bernie Madoff (“It was definitely a Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus moment—Oh, my God, I would so much rather write the libretto of an opera about Bernie Madoff than make a documentary about him”), but for “Number Our Days” Woolf suggested an oratorio instead of an opera, to emphasize community. That felt right, and in the libretto Van Taylor put the pieces together “in a shape that would tell a story about the bigger themes, loss and connection and memory.”