Great Danes

MICHAEL FRAYN'S HIT PLAY COPENHAGEN COMES TO BROADWAY

play with no stage directions, a stark set featuring three characters and three chairs, a dispute over protons, mesons, quantum physics, and the theory of complementarity—admittedly, Michael Frayn's Copenhagen, which opens on Broadway this month, makes few concessions to drama, as in "dramatic." But when this austere symposium opened in London two years ago, British reviewers cried "Masterpiece!," prize judges rubbed their eyes, and culture-vultures enthusiastically dropped it into conversation at Notting Hill dinner parties.

Frayn is an accomplished farceur, a comic novelist, and a sensitive translator of Chekhov, but this is a deadly-serious workout in the intellectual gymnasium of his mind. It inspects, and replays in a postmortem limbo, the fateful encounter in 1941 in Nazi-occupied Denmark (hence the title) between Niels Bohr, Nobel laureate and a father of quantum theory, and his onetime protege Werner Heisenberg, author of the uncertainty principle. Both were researching nuclear fission at the time: Bohr's work later led to the Los Alamos bomb project; the German Heisenberg's work, supposedly for the Nazis, led nowhere. Did the two men, during a 10-minute stroll, debate the moral right of science to participate in destruction? Did Bohr persuade Heisenberg to fail in his research and thus change the nature of history? (Or did they have a falling-out over the quality of Danish pastries?) Copenhagen is a dispute about the largest issues of the 20th century, a play whose neutron blizzard of hard science never conceals its central engagement with the unknowability of human beings.

Too grim for Broadway? "Anyone who predicts anything in the theater is a fool," says Frayn, "but a lot of American visitors and groups of serious American theatergoers have seen the play in London, and they all enjoyed it. The signs are encouraging." (Rating: ★★★)

JOHN WALSH