Nuclear Physicists Hit Broadway
by Logan Hill

3:00 a.m. Mar. 31, 2000 PST
NEW YORK -- A heady drama about nuclear physics and wartime morality has hit Broadway, right next to the tourist-friendly musical Jekyl & Hyde. So what's next, Schrödinger's Cats?

British playwright Michael Frayn has brought his award-winning drama Copenhagen to New York after a shockingly successful English run.

The subject of this unlikely hit is the fabled meeting between physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. In 1941, the German Heisenberg was eagerly pursuing a workable atomic bomb for his country and the Danish Bohr was researching quantum physics in Copenhagen.

At the beginning of the play, Heisenberg jokes, "I am remembered for only two things. The first is my Uncertainty Principle. The other is my mysterious visit to Copenhagen in 1941."

The genesis of the work, according to Frayn, was a simple, unanswered question: "Why did Heisenberg go to Copenhagen in 1941, despite the fact that he knew it would be so awkward?"

Frayn is known best for satirical novels like Headlong and stage comedies like Noises Off. He reconstructed and dramatized multiple versions of the controversial meeting that surely endangered both men's lives.

The drama, an unusual attempt to bring the history of science to a larger audience, suggests what Heisenberg might have been pondering at that moment.

Was he looking for his one-time mentor Bohr's assistance? Or was he looking for information on the Allies' nuclear program, because he suspected that Bohr had contacts among the physicists who had been exiled by the Nazis? Was he trying to warn Bohr of the German nuclear program? Or did Heisenberg simply miss an old friend and father figure?

Frayn also asks whether Heisenberg himself even knew why he made that strange journey in the middle of a war.

In the end, Frayn said, his play is speculation, and the limits of speculation, both scientific and psychological, is at the heart of his work.

Copenhagen posits a psychological equivalent to Heisenberg's famous Uncertainty Principle, partly because the more Frayn studied the historical record, the more plausible motives there were for Heisenberg's visit.

Frayn said his play compares the "physical uncertainty" of observation as stated in Heisenberg's principle to the theoretical difficulty of ever knowing a person's motivations. His play attempts to fill in the gaps in the history books.

"The characters say things they never said in their lives," said Frayn, "but all the scientific background and their characterizations are as historically accurate as I could make them."

Frayn researched the play arduously. Trained in philosophy, he embarked on a difficult crash-course in nuclear physics after reading the biography Heisenberg's War by Thomas Powers. Then he read all the histories, in German and English, that he could find about the two men and their time.
The result is a complex, thoughtful play about two men who must navigate their way through a critical historical moment that mixes biographical color with dire philosophical quandaries. Almost the entire play is written in very casual idiom.

"Bohr had an extremely elevated view of plain language," Frayn said. "He felt that quantum mechanics ought to be explicable in the language most people understand. He did in fact discuss everything with his wife, who had no scientific training."

Bohr's wife, Margrethe, figures prominently in the three-person cast, and it is she who acts as a convenient narrative device. "If she weren't in the room," Frayn said, "I doubt many of us would be able to understand what they say to each other."

At the recent Creating Copenhagen conference in Manhattan, Heisenberg biographer David Cassidy said, "I am delighted that Michael has taken the first steps toward grappling with these ethical issues. As a spectator, I am amazed at how [it] works as theater."

Though Cassidy gave a generally positive review of the play, he and several other historians have, of course, criticized aspects of the play's abbreviated content.

"As an author, I obviously appreciate that Frayn has read his Cassidy," said Cassidy, author of Uncertainty: The Life and Science of Werner Heisenberg. "But as a historian I am disappointed that he did not include a fuller appreciation of the larger historical issues and the historical setting."

Harvard University science historian Gerald Horton agreed. He said that he was excited by the attempt to "bring together these three quite different worlds: history, science, and the theater."

Yet, he said, "the intermingling of playwrights and actors, physicists and science historians" may not be all wonderful if people confuse fiction with fact.

"Just think how many people think they know all about Galileo," joked Horton, "from Bertolt Brecht," whose avant-garde work Life of Galileo tells little at all about Galileo, the man, indeed.

And 93-year-old Nobel Prize winner Hans A. Bethe stressed the serious difficulty of capturing in any medium the problematic World War II period. "No one can understand the stress that was placed on the German scientists working in the Nazis' time," he said.

However, the play has won a surprising following. Transferred to the West End last February after opening at the Royal National Theatre's Cottesloe Theatre in May 1998, it has been sold out regularly since. It was even awarded the prestigious Evening Standard award for Best Play.
The New York play's new company, featuring Philip Bosco, Michael Cumpsty, and Blair Brown, will open officially on April 11 for an open-ended run.

Copenhagen arrives in New York just as science has hit several city stages.

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