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Copenhagen

Reviewed by Lyle Zimskind

Rubicon Theatre

Through September 27

RECOMMENDED:

British dramatist Michael Frayn packs a lot of scientific history and theoretical physics into his two-and-a-half-hour drama Copenhagen, which won the Tony Award for Best Play back in 2000. This intriguing intellectual reflection on the real-life, mystery-shrouded meeting between two Nobel Prize-winning nuclear physicists in the Danish capital during World War II is currently running at the Rubicon Theatre in Ventura.

Denmark native Niels Bohr (Peter Van Norden) had been an academic and professional mentor, as well as a good friend, of the German scientist Werner Heisenberg (Brett Rickaby) years before the war. By 1941, though, the half-Jewish Bohr and his wife Margrethe (Linda Purl) were living in only tenuous safety in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen, while Heisenberg engaged in nuclear fission research for Hitler’s government. In September of that year Heisenberg paid a personal visit to the Bohrs, followed by a walk and a private conversation with Niels that did not last for very long before the Danish scientist ended it abruptly and in great agitation.

What exactly the two men discussed when they were alone together in the open air, away from any other human or electronically planted listening devices, remained a historically controversial question for decades, as the scientists’ respective post-war accounts were decisively at odds with each other. Frayn’s play situates Heisenberg and the Bohrs in an afterlife realm where they are free to investigate their distinct remembered versions of that 1941 encounter in successively reenacted “drafts.”

Based on the players’ conflicting statements after the war, Frayn surmises that Heisenberg surprised and alarmed his old teacher by suggesting that a nuclear weapon could be developed in time to have a decisive impact on the outcome of the war. The play further suggests that Bohr was horrified not only that Heisenberg convincingly believed this catastrophic scientific feat could be achieved, but that he was working on that project for the Nazis. Two years after their meeting, Bohr fled Denmark for the United States and joined the team at Los Alamos which successfully developed the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, providing fodder for Heisenberg to return the recrimination in his cordial post-mortal discussions with the Bohrs.

It all adds up to an interesting historical story that makes no pretense at providing ethical enlightenment for our latter-day global dilemmas. The intimate Rubicon theater space is certainly more conducive for a talky piece like this than the big houses where Copenhagen was originally introduced to U.S. audiences. And all three actors imbue their characters with highly engaging personalities, whose highly charged conversations are deftly propelled by prominent Irish director Judy Hegarty Lovett. Scenic and projection designer Trefoni Michael Rizzi allows us to move back and forth between temporal and ethereal realms without confusion, and Cricket S. Meyers sets the production’s portentous tone with a subtle atmospheric soundscape.

Rubicon Theatre, 1006 E. Main Street, Ventura; Wed., 7 p.m.; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Wed., Sat. & Sun., 2 p.m.; through September (805) 667-2900, rubicontheatre.org.