Theater Review: Copenhagen

As a self-reward and recovery for the expected horrible meeting on Thursday, I got a pair of tickts to the American Repertory Theater's production of Copenhagen. Note that if any locals are interested, the run ends this Sunday. I invited along Judy (former landlady when Bird, Grendel, and I lived in North Cambridge).

Man... I really need to get to the theater more often--especially the ART, which is one subway stop down the street from work. I'm embarrassed that I don't do it more often, but there you go. (Speaking of which--anyone interested in seeing Avenue Q when it comes to Boston in mid-March?

This play is a fictionalized version of the meeting of the physicists Werner Heisenberg and Neils Bohr (his mentor) in occupied Denmark in 1941, dealing with the morality of scientists creating nuclear weapons. Heisenberg was working for the Germans--was he trying to develop nuclear weapons for the Reich, or was he secretly trying to sabotage the efforts? Or was he unable to? Or was he too afraid to say that he could do so, fearing the consequences if he failed?

It is told Rashomon-style, running through what might have been said, what motivations were, in various iterations. I'm not doing a synopsis, but you can check out the various ART pages about the play.

As one quick point, it was interesting to hear names that I know from textbook theorems, proofs, and famous experiments as background characters--"...and then Pauli got on the train, to ask me if I had changed my mind..."

Coming from a technical background, when playwrights and artists go nuts using relativity/wave-particle duality/the uncertainty principle as a dramatic or literary device, it sometimes makes me wince a little bit. Admittedly, this play handled it reasonably well. But my mind kept on wandering to one of those 'Trivia' items for various movies, e.g, Reservoir Dogs--The film contains 272 uses of the word "fuck". I was wondering just how many times the word "uncertainty" was said throughout the play.

The play is drawn so that Heisenberg is a sympathetic figure... it's impossible to know what he really intended, but it was a moral situation that I can hope none of us are ever forced into. His recounting of Germany as a shattered country during his childhood (at the end of World War I) and as an adult (after World War II, recounting trying to get food for his starving family) are affecting. As a character, he has an intense rapid fire delivery that matches the character that I would expect would be, with underlying layers of coiled emotions.

I found the set design pretty interesting:

David Reynoso knows that the set for Copenhagen will ruffle feathers. Dominated by an immense metallic sculpture, the design evokes the fear of the atomic bomb’s development and the whimsical designs of Alexander Calder. Surfing YouTube one afternoon, Reynoso hit upon his design’s impetus: footage of Poi, a form of juggling from New Zealand where balls on strings represent atomic particles in motion. Because the sculpture is formed from phosphorescent tubing, lighting designer Ken Helvig can fill it with small LED lights. The result is an overhead cyclorama: color and light float across Reynoso’s atomic framework, glowing downward on actors and audience alike.

As one aside for the real geeks in the audience, in one scene, Bohr and Heisenberg are discussing results from cloud chamber experiments. In the meanwhile, the overhead display send similar tracks of light zooming around the framework.

The play was very long (2-1/2 hours, with 15 minute intermission), and I thought the beginning of the second act dragged a little bit. But overall, it was thoroughly worthwhile to see.

Even better yet, after the play, Judy ran into some friends (Julie and Stu), and we all went out for drinks and snacks at Casablanca--a great way to wrap up an evening, especially on a 'school night' (getting home around midnight). All good.