Starring roles in play not a quantum leap for these two

In most towns, a local theater troupe might boost ticket sales by having the mayor or the high school football coach take small parts in, say, “Annie Get Your Gun!”

In Santa Barbara, where the university is home to five Nobel laureates, the Ensemble Theatre Company has rejiggered the formula: On Sunday, two Nobel Prize-winning physicists will portray two other Nobel Prize-winning physicists in a reading from a play that revolves around quantum mechanics and the development of nuclear weapons.

Michael Frayn’s “Copenhagen” isn’t the kind of production that leaves ‘em laughing. But it won a Tony Award for best play in 2000, and the $75-a-ticket benefit for the theater company at Santa Barbara’s Music Academy of the West is sold out.

“Believe me, I understand very little about quantum mechanics,” said Nancy Kawalek, its director. “But I know it’s related to the idea of possible parallel universes, and here we have Nobel Prize-winning physicists playing Nobel Prize-winning physicists. That’s part of the magic.”

On the face of it, Kawalek’s casting choices of Alan Heeger (2000 Nobel winner) and David Gross (2004 Nobel winner) could have been seen as a little crazy.

The two male leads -- whose costar is actress Stephanie Zimbalist -- aren’t exactly matinee idols. They’re aging, only a handful of people in the world can understand what they’re talking about much of the time, and between them they don’t have an acting credit to their names.

But they’ve played Stockholm, baby -- and besides, Kawalek, who runs a theater program at UC Santa Barbara, figured they were available. They are colleagues of her husband, UCSB physicist David D. Awschalom, who will open for them Sunday with a summary of the scientific concepts in the play.

“You should have seen his face when I told him he had to do it in five minutes,” Kawalek said.

Both Heeger and Gross are big fans of “Copenhagen,” an intense imagining of an actual 1941 meeting between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, two of the 20th century’s greatest scientists. The men were old friends but bitterly parted ways, perhaps over Heisenberg’s work for the Germans on the creation of an atomic bomb.

“It’s an interesting, intriguing, wonderful play,” said Heeger, who received the Nobel for his insights into the electrical conductivity of plastics.

But for a novice actor, playing Bohr is no cakewalk.

“I’m used to standing in front of an audience,” Heeger said, “but I’m telling my story and it’s my physics. It’s quite different getting inside of someone else.”

Although he hasn’t trod the boards, Heeger is no stranger to theater. He was on Ensemble’s board for several years, and his wife, Ruth, is active with the group. The couple have invested in several Broadway productions.

Gross, director of UCSB’s Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, plays Heisenberg -- whom he met early in his career. The play is structured around Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle: the dizzying notion that observing an event changes it, and so nothing can be known with precision.

For Gross, that kind of abstraction is easy, but acting -- now, that’s hard. He figures his grasp of science will help.

“I saw a marvelous BBC production of ‘Copenhagen,’ with really great actors who clearly didn’t understand physics,” Gross said. “I doubt it was noticeable to anyone but a physicist, but there were one or two places where I said, ‘Ouch!’ ”

steve.chawkins@latimes.com