2000 Tony^® Award winner by Michael Frayn

Central Iowa Premiere

“fascinating”
Jeffrey Bruner,
Des Moines Register

“crackling drama blossoms”
John Busbee, ArtScene Magazine

Buy the script or PBS DVD on amazon.com:
Script - Copenhagen
DVD - Copenhagen (PBS Hollywood Presents)

ORIGINAL RUN
April 21-30, 2006

The cast and crew

About the show

One miscalculation can decide the fate of the world.

TFAC presents the central Iowa premiere of Michael Frayn’s Tony Award winning play COPENHAGEN.

As we enter the fourth year of the war in Iraq, many would say that the United States made a grievous miscalculation in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Many say the decision to go to war made upon bad and false information. We have found no weapons of mass destruction, we have found no evidence of a nuclear weapon program.

What if 65 years ago, September 1941, a similar miscalculation was made? At the height of World War II Nazi nuclear program scientist Werner Heisenberg met secretly with his former mentor Niels Bohr at Bohr’s home in Denmark. The US nuclear weapon program, which included many former German scientists whom Bohr would join 2 years later, was already under way and the Nazi program was also investigating the exploitation of atomic science. What would our world be like if the Nazi program had succeeded first? What slowed the progress of the Nazi program? Could it have been one miscalculation on Heisenberg’s part? Was it due to the context of the meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg?

COPENHAGEN investigates the possible details of the secret meeting in 1941 between the two Nobel Prize winning physicists. Together they had revolutionized atomic science in the 1920s, but now they were on opposite sides of a world war. In this incisive drama, the two men meet in a situation fraught with danger in hopes of discovering why we do what we do.

Even to this day, the exact events that transpired during that meeting aren’t certain. During their lives, Bohr and Heisenberg’s friendship ended during that meeting and neither one could agree on what actually occurred that evening in Copenhagen. The two men put different interpretations impressions of why Heisenberg requested the meeting, and what he hoped to gain from it, a theme which mirrors the ambiguity of the Copenhagen Interpretation widely used in quantum physics.

As COPENHAGEN unfolds, we see the ghosts of Bohr and Heisenberg still agonizing over that night. In death, the two physicists debate their encounter, physics, morality and salvation in the presence of Margrethe Bohr and unravel the truth, untruths or perspectives.

One miscalculation can decide the fate of the world … Their discussions, their interpretations, and their own personal conflicts are as relevant today as they were over 60 years ago.