Theater Review: 'Copenhagen' clarifies debate around creation of fission bomb but needs some fine tuning

“Copenhagen”
The Attic Theatre and Film Center
Through April 23

“Copenhagen” is a play about superstar physicists Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr discussing the uncertain construction of a fission bomb by the United States during the genesis of World War II. Despite the dauntingly academic subjects, “Copenhagen” has won the Tony award for Best Broadway Play and has appealed to various audiences, including the scientifically illiterate such as myself.

With superb attention to historical detail, the play begins and ends in the heads of the ghosts of the scientists and moves through reconstructed conversations of a single visit of Heisenberg to Copenhagen to engage Bohr in the subject of the creation of a fission bomb and alas, the ticking future of the politics of death and war. The conversation has arrived at The Attic Theatre and Film Center with Black Cat Productions and continues through April 23.

Bringing back the dead is tricky. At the very beginning of the play, the two scientists ““ including Bohr’s wife, Margrethe ““ stand like statues in a row and seem to dictate the facts of the war and fission bomb to the audience. This opening is startlingly similar to monotone historical re-enactments in civil war fairs, but the spell is haply broken once the conversations emerge.

Two thick acts of conversation result with some incredibly approachable explanations of nuclear reactors and the uncertainty principle that translate the movement of atoms to the flow of characters on the stage. However, Lewis Hauser’s direction was lacking some sort of vision, and I found myself predicting a conventional circular movement around stage all too often. The material of the play is quite unconventional and frankly dense, while some inventive direction could have made the pace a tad more tolerable.

Seeing historical characters alive on stage is exciting if it feels accurate. Joanna Churgin played a strong and stubborn Margrethe who lived up to her role as a skeptic and the level-headed judge of the purpose of Heisenberg’s visit to their home. Her strong sense of character held the play together and gave the needed third dimension that drew in the audience as a fellow judge as to what truly happened during the Bohr-Heisenberg conversation.

Churgin’s appropriately cold deliveries were a contrast to Jack Winnick, who played a warm and paternal Niels Bohr, seated with the due relaxed posture of the pope of physics. Richard Lucas, however, was a flat and inscrutable Heisenberg. Long speeches about the brutalities of the war in Germany that should have brought a tear seemed performed, and he fell out of character a few times, apparently fishing for lines. While the back and forth conversations should have been wound tightly like clockwork, there were a few distracting ticks to the tock.

The play does not require previous scientific or historical knowledge to be understood, and those who see it will be proud to have a few explanations for the uncertainty principle. Anyone with a slight interest in the bomb or in politics should experience this play in some way. “Copenhagen” conveys the tense atmosphere that exists simply in the minds of the scientists, as illustrated by this production set atop a large radioactivity symbol. A single idea and something as small as an atom could create the devastation that we have seen endure for years to come.