Rocket science

Copenhagen is long overdue for a local production. Give credit to the B Street Theatre for finally taking the plunge. Winner of a Tony in 2000 and widely regarded as a great play, Copenhagen was written in 1998 by Michael Frayn, best known for his delirious backstage farce Noises Off.

The play takes place somewhere in the afterlife, and the characters in Copenhagen move on a stark, circular set that looks like a flattened half-moon or perhaps a lateral slice of gray matter from an enormous brain. The story finds physicist Niels Bohr and wife Margrethe re-enacting their mysterious 1941 meeting with Bohr’s onetime academic protégé Werner Heisenberg in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen—a meeting chin deep in implications.

Frayn layered tension at several levels, including personal, historical, conspiratorial and scientific. There’s a disrupted, paternal-like bond between the two physicists. There’s also the knowledge, in the afterlife, that the half-Jewish Bohr soon would flee the Nazis on a fishing boat and take a hand in designing the atomic bomb that exploded over Nagasaki while Heisenberg stayed in Germany, working on a nuclear reactor that could have led to the Nazis making their own atom bomb. And the world would have been a very different place if Hitler had created mushroom clouds over London and Paris.

Again and again, Frayn returns to this question: Why did Heisenberg make the risky trip to see Bohr in 1941? To get his help? To warn him? And who should feel more guilt and responsibility—Heisenberg, who could have left Germany but stayed? Or Bohr, who agonized in later years about the weapons he’d helped to create?

There are no easy answers on either count. But, along the way, Frayn sets up some breathtakingly well-written scenes that work off of physics, psychology and a moment in time at which history could have gone either way.

The B Street production features three solid Bay Area actors: Julian López-Morillas (Bohr), Jessica Powell (Margrethe) and Alex Moggridge (Heisenberg) under director Kenneth Kelleher, who did B Street’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane. Each contributes good work at various points, but last Sunday’s press opening left the impression that the project still needed a few more days in rehearsal, often a problem with B Street openings. Hesitation over names of other scientists, and a few lines hastily recovered, however, are problems that probably will have settled down by the time you read this.

The show deserves a strong recommendation in any case. Despite minor glitches in the execution, it’s such a brilliant script that it deserves your attention. And, when everything’s in synch, this show’s a beauty. The closing minutes, in particular, are an incredible conjunction of great writing and powerful staging, and they literally brought a few tears to this jaded reviewer’s eyes.