David Brian Alley plays Werner Heisenberg, Linda Stephens is Margrethe Bohr and Dan Kremer plays Neils Bohr in Clarence Brown Theatre’s production of “Copenhagen.”

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A writers' conference in New York in 1998, the year Michael Frayn wrote “Copenhagen,” the intellectually demanding and rewarding play that opened Thursday night at the University of Tennessee’s Clarence Brown Theatre, considered the question of whether writers had ethical and moral rights to use the lives of others in pursuit of one’s own ends.

One participant went so far as to say that every author’s rite of passage was to write a story after which a family member was no longer on speaking terms.

In “Copenhagen,” Frayn’s imagined reconstruction of a 1941 meeting between German physicist Werner Heisenberg and Danish physicist Niels Bohr, the issue isn’t how much damage words can do, but the real sticks and stones of nuclear fission and whether scientists should do their work without consideration of its consequences.

Just as importantly, if science is exempt, are also religion and politics, all of which are entangled in this play? Bohr, was, after all, half Jewish, which Heisenberg knew, and, while scientific companions, they were on opposite sides of a life-and-death struggle.

Like the 1946 encounter between philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper at Cambridge, no one is sure what was actually said, but the developments of their discipline, along with the whole world, were changed forever. Neither was Heisenberg and Bohrs’ relationship again the same.

With the foundation of Heisenberg’s development of quantum mechanics and its underlying Uncertainty Principal, along with Bohrs’ principal of Complementarity, Frayn builds dramatic tension using nothing more that three people talking (Bohr’s wife Margrethe, the play’s emotional center played by Linda Stevens, being the third) for two acts and more than 2 hours.

Appropriately performed at Ula Love Doughty Carousel Theatre on a set that could be a model of an atom, with its blue nucleus center and electron pathways encircling it, “Copenhagen” is part history lesson, part physics lecture, part psychological analysis of what motivates great minds who alternately admire and trash talk each other’s achievements.

It is also a peek into the love-hate dichotomy often built into mentor-student relationships.

Had Heisenberg, calculatingly well played by David Brian Alley, come to Copenhagen to secretly tell Bohr, superbly played by Dan Kremer, that the Nazis were working on making an atomic bomb, or to clandestinely find out if the Allies were? Or had he returned to an intellectual nest to find emotional comfort in an increasingly cutthroat, politically charged environment?

Had Heisenberg adroitly maneuvered through Nazi red tape to get from Leipzig to Copenhagen in order to prove his worth to the cause, thereby maintaining control of the direction of German research to keep a dangerous weapon out of the hands of crazed forces?

Or was he hoping Bohr would help him unlock a puzzle he had not been able to solve, so he could elevate his status with the Nazis, ensuring his and family’s survival?

Like a particle in Heisenberg’s quantum theory, the conversation is in one time frame at one moment and half a sentence later years away. Then, in the flash of a photon, back again. The listener’s only consolation is that every word is a quarter note in 4/4 time.

This steady rhythm is also one of this production’s problems. How could people this passionate, dispassionately not talk over one another?

But then, maybe part of the play’s point is that scientists are, by training, dematerialized, proving another of Heisenberg’s principles, that “Whenever one treats living organisms as physiochemical systems they must necessarily behave as such.”

In any case, all but the scientifically astute would be well advised to read the glossary of terms in the back of the program before the lights go down.

Timed to coincide with an international science conference, “Quark Matter 2009,” being held at UT, “Copenhagen’s” electrons will be in orbit until April 11. For tickets, call the box office at 865-974-5161.

© 2009, Knoxville News Sentinel
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