ARTicles vol. 6 i.2b: Resolute Uncertainty

Heidi Nelson: What initially attracted you to this play?

Scott Zigler: The emotional landscape. There’s an interesting juxtaposition of the dynamics of a family and the dynamics of epic historical events. The play is an illustration of how deeply personal dynamics interweave with momentous events. Copenhagenfinds a correlation between the personal and the historical as effectively as almost any play I can think of.

HN: How do you help the actors keep this play exciting onstage when they’re essentially telling different versions of the same story?

SZ: Whenever a play deals with a recounting of past events, it has to be driven by a few important questions: Why is it necessary to recount the events now? What are the politics of the current interaction? Why do the characters need to resolve this? These three characters need to come to some kind of understanding about what their past meant to each of them. Their need to revisit this point means that there’s something seminal about these events in their psychological make-up that needs closure.

HN: Did you need to know a lot about Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg to direct this play?

SZ: It’s important to know how this set of events was significant to each of these human begins and to know the historical consequences of the events. Something that was tremendously helpful was meeting with Gerald Holton and Peter Galison from the History of Science Department here at Harvard. Getting their points of view about the importance of these events helped us understand why these characters might have a need to win this debate over what actually occurred in Copenhagen.

HN: Some scientists have challenged the accuracy of this play. How has that affected you in rehearsals?

SZ: It’s amazing how much information came out after the play was written, and the majority of the evidence seems to refute some of the positions Frayn is trying to take. My own approach to directing is to try to stage the play that the writer wrote, but some of the visual elements we’ve developed at the end of the production may help give the events a more accurate historical context.

HN: How did you and designer David Reynoso collaborate on the set?

SZ: The structure of the atom and the interaction of sub-atomic particles are important parts of the texture of Frayn’s play, and we wanted to acknowledge that. So early in the process, David brought in images that established a visual relationship between the structure of the atom and the cosmos. Exploring the relationship between the smallest particles of matter and the larger world seemed appropriate because the play is about personal, intimate relationships and how those relationships relate to what is arguably the most momentous event of the twentieth century.

HN: Some critics have suggested that the play dramatizes Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and Bohr’s Complementarity Principle. Are you interested in staging either of these theories?

SZ: Those principles emerge on their own and are inherent in how the interactions occur onstage. The drama is driven by our uncertainty over what actually occurred in this famous conversation between Bohr and Heisenberg. Part of the idea of the Uncertainty Principle, in my layperson’s understanding of it, is that it’s impossible to know the properties of anything because as soon as you observe it, you change its properties. I think that’s true of this conversation. As soon as the characters study this conversation, their points of view greatly affect their recollections. We don’t know what the conversation was precisely because as soon as we study it from the future, we’re already changing it in some way, whether it’s for political, psychological, or emotional reasons.

HN: Are you satisfied by the characters’ final version of what happened in Copenhagen?

SZ: I’m not really satisfied with it, but I don’t think satisfaction is actually the play’s goal. I think satisfaction is the characters’ goal, but the point of the play is to frame questions. The play may be suggesting that we need to make peace with our inability to come up with satisfactory resolutions to these kinds of situations.

Heidi Nelson is a first-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.

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