Arts & Entertainment
 

Great minds meet at Main Street

'Copenhagen' shows last meeting of two brilliant physicists

By Chris Brunt
The Daily Cougar

The oft-quoted axiom, "civil war pits brother against brother, father against son," seems to be a cut and dry concept. We usually hear it in reference to our own Civil War, though it certainly applies for Europeans in World War II, when Nazi Germany divided the continent along lines of blood and creed. In Michael Frayn's Copenhagen, the question is what happens when the father and son are two of the only people on Earth with the knowledge to build an atomic bomb.

Niels Bohr, a half-Jewish Dane, and Werner Heisenberg, a German, were two of the greatest physicists the world has ever known. In the 1920s, the elder Bohr took young Heisenberg under his wing to produce what would eventually become the Copenhagen Interpretation of theoretical physics.

During that time, the long-accepted tenets of classical physics were overturned almost daily by new advancements and new wizards sprung out of the universities to compete and contribute their theories.

Perhaps none of these young Turks made as big of an impact as the 20-year-old Heisenberg, whose Uncertainty Principle rivaled Albert Einstein's Relativity and Bohr's Complementarity as the biggest theoretical groundbreaking in the 20th century, and he did it in Copenhagen under the tutelage of his beloved mentor Bohr.

When Hitler came to power, the famous duo found each other on opposing sides -- Heisenberg with the Nazis, Bohr with the Allies. Frayn's play is an interpretation of the famous 1941 meeting in which Heisenberg journeyed to Niels and Margrethe Bohr's house in occupied Denmark, the very home in which the two men had once bonded their genius and their friendship.

The play features Niels, his wife Margrethe, and Heisenberg in some nondescript post-mortem free float, much like purgatory, and the story is told through their memories. The literal problem they struggle with is the same question the whole world wanted to know: "Why did Heisenberg go to Bohr's house in 1941?"

Through their memory of that day, they each propose an answer to this question and the momentum of the piece is produced by constant amelioration of those answers, like drafts of a paper. It is hard to locate a major theme that it is not powerfully challenged in Copenhagen, though duty in all its manifestations is perhaps the centerpiece: duty to one's country, to one's family, to one's field and what one must do when all of those duties converge.

Rebecca Greene Udden directs a solid Main Street production, featuring the casting of Thomas Prior as the slightly foppish Heisenberg, Claire Hart-Palumbo as Niel's wife Margrethe, and Charles Tanner as the benevolent old Bohr. The play consists entirely of dialogue and blocking, but Main Street handles it well despite a few hiccups.

The set is bare, save but three chairs. The characters are physically dead, as is the event in question, and have only their memories to create understanding. The audience must determine a concrete morality out of elements no more tangible than electrons in orbit.

Amid the implied terror of an occupied Denmark the two great men walk, each threatened by the other, by the intricacies of their conscience and indomitable drive of the spirit to understand its universe. The repercussions of their words could mean Armageddon and yet side by side they walk, onward to Elsinore, toward the darkness in the human heart.

Copenhagen

Main Street Theater, 2540 Times Blvd.

Playing: Now through Feb. 14

The verdict: Frayn has crafted a magnificent photon of words aimed at the nucleus of the human situation. In the hands of Main Street Theater, it strikes chillingly near.

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