Reading Done, Time to Narrate

So Copenhagen has come and gone.  I saw this show when it was on tour some years ago and I must say that I think our reading was much better than that show.  Copenhagen is a difficult piece:  It's only three characters constantly talking at each other.  On top of that, they go over the same point multiple times.  And then, of course, there is the subject matter:  Nuclear physics.

Copenhagen is about the meeting between Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr in September of 1941.  World War II was in full swing, and Denmark was occupied by Germany.  German Heisenberg went to Denmark to visit his old, Danish mentor, Bohr.  Both were theoretical physicists, working on the internals of the atom.  In the 20s, the two had worked together to come up with what is called the "Copenhagen Interpreation" of Quantum Mechanics.

In the late 30s, nuclear fission had been discovered.  When a neutron is fired at an atom of uranium, it splits and releases energy and in the process, a couple more neutrons.  Could this process be used to create a weapon?  Thus, the meeting between Heisenberg and Bohr is so fraught.  Bohr had been working with the Americans on nuclear physics previously and had done work in the fission of uranium.  Bohr's contention was that it was impossible at the time to build a weapon out of uranium.

Natural uranium comes in two different types:  ²³⁵U and ²³⁸U (the number refers to the number of neutrons in the nucleus of the atom).  In naturally-occurring uranium, most of it is made of the ²³⁸U type which requires extremely fast neutrons in order to split.  In ²³⁵U, the neutrons don't need to be so fast. If you were going to make a bomb, you'd need mostly ²³⁵U, but it is extremely difficult to separate out the two types.  Given the processes at the time, Bohr figured it would take about 26,000 years to get enough to make a bomb.

Had Heisenberg figured out a way to make a bomb out of uranium? What exactly did the two talk about? While visiting, it seems the conversation failed miserably with the visit cut short. However, the two were talking outside and alone and thus there are no records of what happened. In later years, Heisenberg would talk about what happened but the story varied over the various tellings.

And this is part of what makes the play so difficult.  Not only do you have to explain the workings of nuclear physics in such a way that people who don't know anything about it can at least follow what it is the two scientists are talking about and do so in an entertaining way, but also there is the fact that the story keeps changing.  Now, this is dramatically and metaphorically appropriate.  Heisenberg developed the Uncertainty Principle which states you cannot know both the position and momentum of a particle with unlimited precision.  There will always be a little bit of uncertainty.  This is because the act of measuring one of those properties changes the other.  Thus, in the context of the play, trying to measure what it was that happened back in 1941 will change our vision of what happened.  Thus, the repeated attempts to understand what happened.

But from an audience's point of view, it can become repetitive.  In the production that I saw, it seems the direction had the actors being somewhat wooden, as if the heaviness of the physics was considered too important.  And yet, my experience as a scientist was that the stodginess and seriousness protrayed in the show was nothing like the way scientists work when they have a disagreement.  When it is a fundamental point of contention, you get into knock-down, drag-out fights.  Thus, the play needs to get more agitated when there are conflicts between the characters.

The playhouse uses their readings as a way to get some feedback from the community regarding what kinds of shows they would like to see in the future, possibly to mount a full production of the play.  Reaction was a bit to be expected:  Many liked it but found it a bit difficult to follow, and a few complained about the repetitivesness, but the overall response was quite positive.

But, that's over and now I'm off to the next production:  Into the Woods.  I've been cast as the Narrator, but the production has decided to split it from the Mysterious Man.  I'm a bit saddened by this because there are some very important plot points that depend upon the two being the same person.  The show opens with the lines, "Once upon a time, in a far off kingdom, there lived a fair maiden; a sad, young lad; and a childless baker with his wife."  These lines are spoken by the Narrator.  At the end of the show, the Baker tells his son, "Once upon a time, in a far off kingdom, there lived a fair maiden; a sad, young lad; and a childless baker with his wife."

We learn through the course of the show that the Mysterious Man is the Baker's father.  And thus, if the Narrator is the Mysterious Man, the show is not just a whimsical, "Let's see what happens if all the fairy tales were mashed together," but rather is the Narrator's story, told to his son, the Baker; told to the Baker's son, and thus the creation of a new fairy tale is born.

Plus, there is a recurrent theme of the past returning when you thought it was dead.  The Baker thought his father died in a "baking accident," but it turns out that he didn't.  The other characters feed the Narrator to the Giant who kills him, or so they think, but the Mysterious Man returns.  In the song, "No More," the Mysterious Man sings, "We disappoint, we disappear, we die, but we don't."

That said, the script itself seems to understand that companies might want to split the characters.  But despite my misgivings, I'm going to do it as I love the show and I'd rather be in it than not.