I was wrong. Oh, so very, very wrong. With Australians fighting apocalyptic bushfires that will transform the face and future of their nation-continent and Nancy Pelosi enjoying the holidays with her children and grandchildren, President Fuckface von Clownstick apparently couldn't stand the lack of attention. Egged on by the rabid religious zealotry of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (who, in 2015, claimed that "Politics is a never-ending struggle ... until the Rapture"), Vice-President Mike Pence (who describes himself as a born-again evangelical Catholic and has boasted that he is "a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order"), and his reliably poor judgment, Donald Trump (a/k/a IMPOTUS) ordered a political assassination guaranteed to destabilize the Middle East before his incompetent son-in-law, Jared Kushner, could do a more spectacular job of fucking things up.
The sorry results show how far we've progressed from game shows like Truth or Consequences and party games like Truth or Dare? Having vaulted past the deadly Crusades of the Middle Ages and the high tech computer hypotheticals seen in 1983's WarGames, humanity is now caught in the terrifying grip of religious fanatics and bellicose, bombastic, and brainwashed chicken hawks leading a new generation of boys with very dangerous toys. In his recent piece entitled "Stumbling Toward Apocalypse: Trump Launches Re-election Campaign With An Assassination," Lucian K. Truscott IV recalls his military misadventures as a journalist during the Bush administration, beginning when he touched down at the same airport in Baghdad where Iran's infamous Major General Qassim Suleimani recently met his death.
Though the specific times and toys may change, we're still reeling from the kind of clusterfuck that occurs when tools of sophisticated slaughter are placed in the hands of misguided men driven by malevolent levels of machismo; when a deadly mixture of hyperreligiosity, systematic stupidity, and misplaced moxie is guided by a perverse heritage of manifest destiny. If those ingredients don't make your hair stand on end, I'd suggest reading K.M. Wehrstein's post on DailyKos entitled "It Looks Like Dementia As Well As NPD -- UPDATED With Poll For Mental Health Professionals" and then watching these two clips from Stanley Kubrick's 1964 political satire entitled Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
From time to time, the adults in the room have tried to put the brakes on poor decision-making that leads to tragic consequences. In 1998, Tony Benn made an impassioned plea for reason before Parliament's House of Commons.
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Twenty years later, we find ourselves in a pitiable position where organized religion and tribalism trump science, fools rush in where angels fear to tread, and powerful men suffering from severe affluenza feel no reason to worry about the consequences of their actions. Without any knowledge of what 2020 would bring, Indra's Net Theatre has chosen the perfect time to stage a revival of Michael Frayn's intense 1998 drama entitled Copenhagen.- Suddenly, and quite unnecessarily, the United States finds itself on the brink of another war in the Middle East.
- Based on newly released archival materials, in 2018 the playwright made some revisions to Copenhagen for a production in London. INT's artistic director, Bruce Coughran (who directed the play here in 2013) is proudly producing and directing what he believes to be the first American staging using the revised edition of Frayn's drama.
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| Nancy Carlin (Margrethe Bohr), Aaron Wilton (Werner Heisenberg) and Robert Ernst (Niels Bohr) in a scene from Copenhagen (Photo by: Bruce Coughran) |
Copenhagen only has three characters. Niels Bohr (Robert Ernst) was the Danish physicist and philosopher who received the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on atomic structure (Bohr famously developed a model of the atom) and quantum theory. Considered to be the godfather of all modern physicists, he is also credited with conceiving and developing the principle of complementarity (which claims that items can behave as either a wave or a stream of particles). The synthetic element Bohrium (Bh) was named in his honor.
Margrethe Nørlund (Nancy Carlin) married Niels on August 1, 1912. The couple had six sons (in 1975 Aage Bohr followed in his father's footsteps when he, too, received the Nobel Prize in Physics).
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| Niels and Margrethe Bohr (Photo courtesy of NielsBohr.net) |
Werner Heisenberg (Aaron Wilton) was the German theoretical physicist who had been one of Bohr's most brilliant assistants and became known for the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. During the 1920s Heisenberg was like a son to the Bohrs. In 1932, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in recognition of his work creating the study of quantum mechanics (which subsequently became the basis for most of today's technology).
The focus of Frayn's script is the September 1941 evening when Heisenberg visited the Bohrs at their home in Denmark (which was, by then, under occupation by the Nazis). Both men were concerned about recent research that might lead to the creation of catastrophic atomic weapons (such as the A-bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945). Although no one else heard what was said during their fateful talk in the garden, the Bohrs were acutely aware that Heisenberg's research was being funded by the Nazis. Whatever was said during his brief visit took a severe toll on their long and cherished friendship. As Coughran notes:
"At the time of [Copenhagen's] writing at the end of the 1990s, we had seen the threat to freedom from fascism -- and then communism -- rise and retreat. The number of nuclear weapons in the world rose from two in mid-1945 to over 70,000 in 1986, and then fell by almost 90% in the years after the fall of the Soviet Union. It seemed like we had avoided the worst. But two decades later, these trends have not continued. We find ourselves now with both the threats to freedom -- and the dangers of nuclear destruction of all life on earth -- rising again. Shockingly, the play holds all of this in its fragile container, as timeless and seemingly transcendent as ever."
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| Aaron Wilton (Werner Heisenberg) and Robert Ernst (Niels Bohr) in a scene from Copenhagen (Photo by: David Rowland) |
"Not only was Copenhagen a worldwide success (including a Tony Award for Best Play), it also inspired in-depth discussions in the academic world; books, papers, and conferences among historians of science worldwide. The Bohr and Heisenberg families even made more private letters public in response to the play. Working with the new text, I was struck by two things: First, that such a marvelous piece of writing could be made better (and it is, I think, a more powerful, more eloquent, and more clear text). Second, that the play has lost nothing of its timeliness."
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| Robert Ernst co-stars as Niels Bohr in Copenhagen (Photo by: Bruce Coughran) |
If 1944's The Glass Menagerie was structured as a memory play by Tennessee Williams so that its protagonist, Tom, could look back on his dysfunctional family from the emotional distance of a globe-hopping gay man who joined the United States Navy, Frayn has structured Copenhagen so that his three characters, caught in a memory hole, can be viewed by the audience (and each other) from a much greater psychological distance: the grave. In its current form, Margrethe takes on the role of the objective observer who sees where each man's self-indulgent memories have enhanced what really happened far beyond the truth (including truths that may have been too painful for Bohr and Heisenberg to admit to themselves). A document on MIT's website entitled "The Net Advance of Physics: Resources for Frayn's Copenhagen: Margrethe Bohr" reveals that:
"The wife and complement of Niels Bohr, Margrethe Norlund Bohr, was an integral part of his life and his work. In Act I of Copenhagen, Bohr says that he is 'a mathematically curious entity: not one but half of two.' He paradoxically [refers to] half of his marriage and half of his friendship and collaboration with Heisenberg. Although Margrethe was not present during the conversation between Bohr and Heisenberg, her being in the play is essential since the conversation in the play is akin to Nietzsche's eternal recurrence at the personal level, an exploration of the loss of their sons: Christian, Harald, and Werner. In the play, the characters are like ghosts who haunt those who caused and participated in their pain. Like analysands trapped in memory and trauma, they talk and talk without resolution."
"Her role in the play is multi-dimensional. Reed Way Dasenbrock suggests that Margrethe's presence is a way of keeping the physics at the audience's level: two physicists left to themselves would talk like physicists, but the two men have to discuss physics in terms Margrethe (and the audience of the play) can understand. Matthias Dörries similarly suggests that Margrethe is like the chorus in Greek tragedy: she clarifies the conversation/action for the audience. But she also has a more traditionally female function in that she opens the emotional discussions about Heisenberg as the enemy, and her comments keep the men from sublimating jealousy and other negative emotions into disagreements about physics. The scientific is the personal, as the political is the personal. Observer and observed are intertwined in life as in science; the resulting observations are not simple data points. As a complement to her husband, she seems at times the contrary of Heisenberg. Frayn's sharp-tongued fictionalization of her appears at odds with the usual portrait of her as a stately woman who was also a mother to his students."
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| Aaron Wilton (Werner Heisenberg), Robert Ernst (Niels Bohr) and Nancy Carlin (Margrethe Bohr) in a scene from Copenhagen (Photo by: David Rowland) |
With minimal set design by Sarah Phykitt, lighting by Jim Cave, and costumes by Lisa Claybaugh, Bruce Coughlin has directed Frayn's drama in a way that keeps the audience riveted in their seats. Whereas the roles of Bohr and Heisenberg present monstrous memorization challenges for actors, his reshaping of Margrethe allows her to be the sobering force which reels in the men's egos in an attempt to make them confront their weaknesses and fallibility. Robert Ernst, Aaron Wilton, and Nancy Carlin do a fine job with Frayn's excessively verbose script, which painfully reminds us of how close we have been thrust, once again, to the brink of nuclear war.
Performances of Copenhagen continue through January 12 at the Berkeley City Club (click here for tickets).
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