Stage

by J. Cooper Robb

>> NOTHING ROTTEN IN THE STATE OF DENMARK

After beginning their seven-show season with three musicals (two of the excessively frivolous variety), the Forrest Theatre changes gears to present Michael Frayn's brilliantly intricate Tony award-winning play Copenhagen. And while the opening-night crowd was conspicuously smaller than those for Contact, Mamma Mia or Saturday Night Fever, there are clearly plenty of people willing to make an effort with this complicated drama based on the 1941 reunion between physicists Werner Heisenberg (Hank Stratton) and Niels Bohr (Len Cariou). And those audience members are amply rewarded by a theatrical experience as emotionally gripping as it is intellectually stimulating.

Structured as a memory play, Copenhagen's Bohr, Heisenberg and Bohr's wife Margrethe (Mariette Hartley) argue in the afterlife about what exactly occurred on that historic day in Copenhagen. Using Heisenberg's own memoirs to recreate the meeting, Frayn gives us three possible scenarios in an attempt to explain why the German Heisenberg risked his career to visit Bohr. Was he prodding the Danish physicist for information on America's nuclear designs? Showing off for his one-time professor now that he was head of the Nazis' nuclear program? Seeking absolution for his role in the occupation of Europe, which included Bohr's beloved Denmark?

But the question of why Heisenberg came to Copenhagen is not nearly as significant as what happened afterward. With the allies and Germans both racing to develop an atomic weapon, Heisenberg long asserted that though he possessed the scientific ability to construct a bomb, he instead steered the Nazis towards the production of a reactor. Historians disagree, citing Heisenberg's mathematical limitations. But the argument allows Frayne to explore science, morality, politics and memory, all of which are inexorably linked.

The three actors perform well under Michael Blakemore's stunning direction and dart about the near barren stage like particles in an atom, a triangle of personalities and ideas that collide and spark a chain reaction of conflicting memories and ideologies.

What makes it all so fascinating is that Frayne refuses to simply indict Heisenberg as an evil Nazi bent on the destruction of the civilized world. Rather, like Bohr himself (troubled by his "small but helpful part in the deaths of a hundred thousand people"), Heisenberg is a patriot attempting to reconcile himself to what's morally irreconcilable. This balancing act leads us to Elsinore, where "the darkness inside the human soul" resides.

Copenhagen never solves the 60-year-old mystery but it does use Heisenberg's "uncertainty principal" to consider the subjective nature of observation, which in this case relates not only to the atom but the men's intentions as well. In Copenhagen the mysteries of science pale in comparison to the mysteries of the soul, proving that it's far easier to explain the workings of an atom than a species bent on destroying itself.
>> Through May 5. $20-$65. Forrest Theatre, 1114 Walnut St. 800.447.7400. www.telecharge.com