Photo from A.R.T. site (thanks)
Except for listening to the same music obsessively - I fear I've posted about my fixation on a certain Sting song and how that led to my meeting him - I'm not given to watching the same movie over and over or returning to the theatre to see a play again.
Last night, my hubby and I returned to Copenhagen, Michael Frayn's masterpiece. As per my previous post on this play at Boston's A.R.T., I was again astonished at the depth of this work. We also had much better seats this time, center, six rows up, and I mean center. Absolutely perfect for engagement with the actors without feeling as if they're looking at you personally (disturbing) yet close enough to detect the small nuances of their performances.
The play is very intellectual with its many references to physics and very moral with its central dilemma. Did out of the heads of these two men - Nils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg - the whole of existence rest, as Margrethe Bohr says near the end of the play? Bohr advised the physicists at Los Alamos who successfully, if that word can be used in regard to the atom bomb, created this horrific weapon; Heisenberg tried and failed with the Germans.
As I've covered the play once before, and Patti Anklam has extended one core concept of the play - Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle - to the domain of social networks, I'll leave it here for now except to say this: Karen MacDonald's performance in the second act last night was astonishing. There's a moment when she erupts at Heisenberg, calling him to account for his complicity and his narcissism, that is so chilling that I can still feel it writing this. The play only runs for one more week. Go.
PS: I still want Margrethe's dress. This picture doesn't do it justice; the drape in the back, women readers is just gorgeous. And the peek-toe shoes aren't bad either.
