The Performances
Mohonk Mountain Stage Company will present another Hudson Valley premiere with Michael Frayn’s Tony Award-winning play Copenhagen, an explosive re-imagining of the clandestine wartime meeting between Nobel laureates Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg to discuss the atomic bomb. In 1941 Heisenberg, the head of the Nazis’ effort to develop a nuclear weapon, visited his mentor and long-time friend, Bohr, in Copenhagen. The men, two of the greatest scientific minds of the century, had worked together earlier on quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle, revolutionizing atomic physics. To Bohr, Heisenberg was a brilliant if irresponsible surrogate son, whose lack of moral compass was part of his genius; to Margrethe, Heisenberg was an untrustworthy student who wasn’t above stealing from her husband’s knowledge. After a brief conversation in the Bohrs’ home, the two men went for a walk. What was discussed during that walk, and its implications for both scientists, have long been a mystery, compounded by the fact that both scientists gave conflicting accounts of the conversation in later years. Frayn uses the framework of atomic physics to explore how an individual’s point of view renders any attempt to discover the ultimate truth of any human interaction fundamentally impossible. The dramatic structure, which returns repeatedly to particular scenes from different points of view, successfully merges the worlds of science and art, resulting in an elegant, electrifying evening of theatre. Readers of this fascinating and complex play are William Connors as Niels Bohr, Christine Crawfis as his wife, Margrethe, and Sean Marrinan as Werner Heisenberg.
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