Meeting of the minds weighs on ‘Copenhagen’
Sometimes theater strives to create a primal sensation of place. Using words, this kind of art evokes smells and sounds, and transports us to alternate times and universes.
Michael Frayn’s 1998 play “Copenhagen” is no such play.
In this exploration of the mysterious meeting between physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in Copenhagen in 1941, the characters speak to us as ghosts. It is a brainy, speculative exercise in the could have’s and might have’s — theories and postulations that live solely in past participles but never the present tense.
As such, seeing the play, presented by Main Street Theater through March 12, and enjoying it as entertainment is a daunting intellectual challenge. You must arrive clear-headed, willing to learn and ready to delve into such topics as whether the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics was one of uncertainty or of complementarity.
No wonder then, that even the formidable acting trio of Celeste Roberts, Joel Sandel and Philip Hays stumbled at times over Frayn’s script, which is so heavy it could anchor the Titanic. They aren’t given natural dialogue but rather textbook-speak, the kind that would make a high school student wonder if history or math was the more boring subject.
The meeting between these two scientific giants is certainly important — with the Allied and Axis powers rushing to build a bomb, the whims of these atomic theorists could save or end the world.
But the historical record of the meeting itself is murky, and therefore, Frayn resorts to speculation, suggesting that Heisenberg’s famous Uncertainty Principle applies to not only our relationship with the physical world but also with history and fiction.
Hays is a fierce performer as the stubborn, egotistical and perhaps delusional (about his own motives) German physicist. Much of the play is a battle of ethics, with Bohr suggesting that Heisenberg’s work under Hitler’s Germany could lead to catastrophic ends.
As Bohr, Sandel bears the aged look of a man wielding both a weapon and a conscience. He has salt-and-pepper hair slicked back in a tight-asnails-comb but fraying in the front, and he speaks a sense of foreboding that often elevates to righteous outrage.
Roberts, as Margrethe Bohr, offers insight to who these men are and what they want. Even if her husband accuses her of “making everything personal,” she speaks with a knowing tone.
The 1941 meeting, she suggests, is about ego. It’s always about ego with these men. Serving as the student not of atoms but of people, Margrethe is the audience stand-in, the narrator who offers insights that are often original and surprising.
These performances save the play from drowning in its tendency to treat its characters as disembodied talking heads, severed not just from a set time and place but from a suspenseful story. But they sometimes talk like people who don’t know their characters intimately, which can happen when actors speak from a script that’s essentially one giant question mark.
This diligent, scholarly presentation gives us three dead people who struggle to come to life.
Compare “Copenhagen” to Main Street Theater’s more successful, recent journeys into history and you realize the script lacks the humor of “The Revolutionists” and the personal trauma of “RFK.”
“Revolutionists” author Lwauren Gunderson once told me about the difficulty of tackling heady subjects in an art form that seeks to first and foremost capture the audience’s attention. Her advice for playwrights is to “make it funny and make it personal.”
Math is a difficult starting point for drama. That’s why “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” for example, saved its solution to the Pythagorean theorem question for the end. Now that’s a play with a gleeful approach to math.
“Copenhagen,” on the other hand, has sparks of brilliance that are nevertheless overshadowed by the thick-as-molasses script. I don’t deny that the philosophical explorations are intriguing at times, that the performances here are praise-worthy or that the design — Ryan McGettigan with set, John Smetak with lighting and Peter Ton with projection — is a minimalist visual treat.
But I ask even the numerous fans of “Copenhagen” — the play debuted to hosannas in 2000 and earned a Tony Award for Best Play — to think of any moment in which they laughed, cried or related to one of the characters.
For even this former physics major, they are as elusive as electrons.