A Playwright’s Quantum Leap

When Michael Frayn’s play “Copenhagen” was previewing on Broadway last year, the author received a harsh letter from a theatergoer. “You may know a little bit about writing plays, Mr. Frayn, but I know something about Broadway,” read the letter. “I’ve been watching plays on Broadway for 30 years now, and I can tell you that if you don’t take all of the science out of your play, you aren’t going to last on Broadway.”

Fortunately, Frayn ignored her. His play about the wartime meeting of Nobel Prize-winning nuclear physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg opened with all its science intact and earned critical raves, then went on to strong box office and the 2000 Tony Award for best play. The drama had also played for three years in London, first at the Royal National Theatre, then on the West End.

Frayn’s look at Bohr, Heisenberg and the bomb opens today at the Wilshire Theatre in Beverly Hills, starring Len Cariou, Hank Stratton and Mariette Hartley. “Copenhagen,” which plays through Jan. 6, imagines what may have happened when Heisenberg, head of Nazi Germany’s nuclear research, traveled to occupied Denmark in 1941 to visit Bohr, his former mentor and a half-Jew, to talk--or not talk--about quantum physics, nuclear fission, war and friendship.

Reached by phone at his office in London, Frayn concedes he was worried about attracting an audience. “I didn’t think for a moment anyone would ever produce it,” says the 68-year-old playwright and novelist. “It seemed to me far too abstract a subject. I was very surprised when the National Theatre said they would do it, and I certainly didn’t think anyone would come to see it.”

Not only did people come to see what one English critic called a blend of historical detective story, morality lecture and lesson in advanced nuclear physics, but the popularity of the play affected its subject matter. “Copenhagen” spurred assorted articles and conferences about the period, creating so much attention that Bohr’s family recently announced it would soon release long-undisclosed materials that may illuminate the 1941 meeting.

At issue are two mysteries. The first mystery is why Heisenberg went to Copenhagen, a question Frayn asks in the first five minutes of the play. He then spends the rest of the play answering with multiple choices: to learn what the Allies were doing in nuclear fission; to reassure Bohr that Germany wasn’t working on a bomb; to recruit his former mentor; to get absolution and/or advice; all of the above; or none of the above. And the second question is why didn’t Heisenberg provide Hitler with a bomb: because he failed scientifically or because he wanted to save the world from Nazi bombing?

Much had been written about Heisenberg and Bohr’s meeting, Frayn says, but the playwright didn’t learn of it until he read Thomas Powers’ 1993 book, “Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History of the German Bomb.” Once he learned of it, he says, “it suggested a way of coming at various problems I had been thinking about for many years in human motivation. Why people do what they do. Why one does what one does oneself.”

Similar questions are also raised in Frayn’s most famous play, “Noises Off,” a farce that has just been revived on Broadway starring Patti LuPone and Peter Gallagher. “You couldn’t have two more different plays than ‘Noises Off’ and ‘Copenhagen,”’ says Michael Blakemore, director of “Copenhagen,” the original production of “Noises Off” and four other Frayn plays. “But the intellectual grasp and attention to detail are common to both plays.”

“Copenhagen’s” Los Angeles opening launches a national tour, and Blakemore met with his actors earlier this month for rehearsals in New York. The Broadway opening of “Noises Off” brought Frayn to New York as well, giving Cariou, Stratton and Hartley an opportunity to talk with him about physics, physicists and fiction.

“We asked him to clarify some of the history,” says Stratton, who plays “whiz kid” Heisenberg. “We wanted to know what was subjective and what was historical fact. Not only is he clear on the historical detail, but he knows the science as well. That’s why, in the play, the science is so easy to follow. Michael Frayn himself is so clear.”

Audiences who see the play may not have the background its actors have, adds Cariou, who plays Bohr, “but it is not really as obtuse as it might seem. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to follow the play. You just have to listen.”

Not that rocket scientists haven’t also enjoyed listening to Frayn’s speculations. When London’s National Theatre toured the play to Oxford, a conference of particle physicists was in town and, recalls Frayn, “I agreed to go and talk to them after the show. I felt very alarmed, being thrown in like Daniel in the lion’s den. But they were very generous and sympathetic.”

Frayn gets great pleasure in that scientific validation, Blakemore says. “The science is correct. It is not popularized. They were complicated propositions, but Michael researched and dealt with them in such a way that an ordinary member of the public could learn about the principles involved and comprehend them.”

Even the show’s set, which is essentially three chairs, helps keep things simple. The characters are conversationally drawn again and again to that fateful 1941 meeting, continually adding context and interpretation. “When the audience comes in, they see what is in front of them, and it’s obvious that is what they get: three actors, three chairs and a very good text,” Blakemore says. “It makes them sit up and listen hard because there’s nothing else.”

“Copenhagen,” which first opened at the National in 1998, launched the most recent spate of plays to successfully dramatize math and science topics for mainstream audiences. Among them: David Auburn’s “Proof,” the 2001 Tony winner for best play, which revolved around a mysterious mathematical proof, and the Mark Taper Forum’s production this year of Peter Parnell’s “QED,” about Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman, which opened at New York’s Lincoln Center this month.

The success of Frayn’s “Copenhagen” has led to related conferences in such places as Copenhagen, Princeton and New York. Says Frayn, “The play did set off a great debate among American historians of science. A great many of them are interested in that period, those particular people and that event, and all have very strong views about it. Some of them thought I had made a mystery where none existed and there was no uncertainty about why Heisenberg went to Copenhagen. But they all had different reasons.

“They also felt, many of them, that I was too soft on Heisenberg. He has had a very bad press. I was his only defender in America. The basic question in the play is, why did he go to Copenhagen? The basic question in [Powers’ book] was, why didn’t he succeed in building the atomic bomb? And he has a double answer for that. One is that German physicists had no great eagerness to do it, which is generally accepted by historians of science and certainly by me. And the other half of his thesis is that Heisenberg did do the relevant mathematics [and science] and deliberately concealed the result to discourage the Nazi government from pursuing the project. I don’t accept that view.”

Now comes potentially new information in the form of 11 documents, including a letter Bohr wrote to Heisenberg about their meeting, which the Bohr family is expected to release early next year. Frayn says he didn’t know about the letter when he wrote “Copenhagen,” although he was later told about it in confidence.

Its existence first surfaced in public at a symposium in March 2000 called “Creating Copenhagen,” which was organized in New York shortly before the play opened there. “Evidently the Bohr family decided they don’t want to contribute to making a mystery of this,” Frayn says. “According to Heisenberg, the conversation was broken off before he had the chance to explain why he had come to Copenhagen. If that’s true, then I don’t suppose Bohr can give us an answer to that question. But it will be extremely interesting to hear Bohr’s direct testimony.”

Whatever the Bohr materials say, Frayn implies, the matter will still not be settled because we really can’t know the true motivation of others. “I suppose I’m interested in how people know and perceive things,” he says. “I think a lot of what I have written is about those questions. All plays and novels are about the way people behave. It’s very difficult to write a play or novel about anything else.

“I said in the postscript of the play that the only way we have of entering the mind of another is through the imagination. That doesn’t preclude doing a lot of research and study, but in the end--whether writing fiction or writing history--you can only enter another person’s thinking and feeling by means of the imagination.”

Frayn has been using that imagination since he was a child. His salesman father wrote comic sketches at Christmas that the family would perform, and Frayn wrote plays for the puppet theater he built as a child. The playwright says he has no recollection of what happened to those early plays, but there have been more than a dozen since--including “Benefactors,” which in 1985 moved to Broadway after London--plus translations of Chekhov plays, nine novels and a book of philosophy.

Trapped onstage during his one acting experience in the army, Frayn first wrote as a journalist, not turning to playwriting again until the early ‘70s. But despite the success of “Noises Off” and some of Frayn’s other humorous work, Blakemore believes it is only in recent years that Frayn “has received his due. Critics tend to think that playwrights who generate laughter are kind of frivolous, and it’s nothing of the kind.”

“Noises Off,” for instance, is so intricately constructed that Frayn admits he never expected actors to be able to perform it. A farce about the production of a sex farce, seen from onstage and backstage, “Noises Off” sends an alcoholic actor, philandering director, sexy starlet and petulant diva rushing in and out of doors, windows and difficult situations. Frayn, who wrote so many endings for the piece during its original London run that his cast at one point refused to learn another one, rewrote the ending when it moved to Broadway in 1985 and did so again for its current revival.

“Noises Off” came about when Frayn was backstage watching another of his farces, and became fascinated by how the actors moved on and off the stage. “He observed and then let his imagination go,” says actress LuPone, who plays the temperamental diva. “We censor ourselves, whether consciously or subconsciously. I’m interested in a lot of different things, and I don’t limit myself. Michael Frayn doesn’t limit himself. It’s a question of trusting yourself.”

Jeremy Sams, who has directed this revival of “Noises Off” first in London and now New York, calls Frayn “a very funny, very serious man.

“He’s fascinated by how one deals with the world. It’s in ‘Copenhagen,’ [Frayn’s 1999 novel] ‘Headlong’ and ‘Noises Off.’ Suddenly the things you know are no longer the case. If you’re an actor and walk onto a stage, expect it to be empty and it’s full of people, what do you then do? Or the converse: You expect it to be full of people and it’s empty. How do you solve the problem?”

Frayn’s plays, Sams adds, share both intricacy and massive humanity. “Michael really doesn’t ever sneer at his characters, ever. ‘Noises Off’ is not sneery about actors. In the dilemmas and quandaries of ‘Copenhagen,’ he empathizes with his characters, and as a result, we the audience say, ‘They are people like us,’ whether they’re actors or nuclear physicists. It has to do with the difficulties of life we all share, whatever profession we’re in.”

Being a writer isn’t all that easy either, Frayn might add, as he challenges such notions as the one that writers have much choice of subjects. “An idea takes hold of you and obsesses you, and there’s no way of predicting what that’s going to be,” he says. “I don’t sit down and think about a likely topic. I think all writers do the same--stories come to them and seize their imaginations.”

Any clues as to what might be seizing his imagination now? “I’m struggling with the beginnings of a play at the moment,” he concedes. “The play is very serious. Completely joke free.” *

“Copenhagen,” Wilshire Theatre, 8440 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills. Today-Jan. 6. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m. Today only, 4 p.m. $25-$60. (213) 365 3500 or (714) 740 7878.

“Noises Off,” Brooks Atkinson Theatre, 256 W. 47th St., New York. $50-$75. Ticketmaster: (212) 307-4100 or (800) 755-4000.