“Well, it's based on true events,” says actor Scot Friedman about the play Copenhagen, “and it centers around [Werner] Heisenberg's so-called ‘mysterious visit’ to Niels Bohr and his wife Margrethe in occupied Denmark in Copenhagen in 1941.”
Copenhagen, by playwright Michael Frayn, centers around the very real but still-mysterious meeting between the two famed physicists during World War II. “And there had been controversy about it,” says Michael Stuart, who plays Bohr in Copenhagen. “They went out on a walk together and came back mad at each other and no one really knew what they were talking about. And for years people were wondering what it was about, and even Bohr and Heisenberg remembered it differently, what actually happened.”
The third character in the play, Bohr’s wife Margrethe, is played by Meredith O’Brien. “This play is such a work of art,” she says, “and it's exciting to give art out into the world.”
Copenhagen is a play about physicists, but like the majority of plays produced in the world, its cast is made up of non-physicists. “I'm a geographer by education,” Friedman says, “so, I mean, I'm in the earth sciences but I'm not a physicist.”
“It's been a learning opportunity for me,” says O’Brien with a laugh.
“I don't even know what I'm talking about in the play,” Stuart says, also laughing, about the science-based dialogue, before explaining that all the actors have learned a bit about theoretical physics since starting production. “it's interesting because [the script] uses terminology that we had to learn to tell the story, instead of just saying words,” he says. “You have to know what you're talking about. And I have the basics of it.”
Stuart adds that, while he doesn’t really connect with Bohr’s job, he does understand him as a person. “Bohr is a grumpy old man and so am I,” he says, “so it works out well.”
O’Brien also has some commonality with Margrethe. “I think a central element to Margrethe is [that] she plays a maternal role,” O’Brien says. “The Bohrs had six children – two of them died in their childhood – and she also sees Heisenberg as a son. He was always kind of a son to Neils. And so that's a real throughline for me.”
“All three characters are dead and they know they're dead,” Friedman says. “So it's a memory play and they're saying now that we're dead, we can talk about these things that happened and try to figure it all out.”
'Copenhagen' runs through November 24 at Sterling Stage Austin.
