"Copenhagen," a Tony Award winning play about ethical, moral and personal dilemmas surrounding the creation of the first nuclear bomb, will provide the backdrop for a two-part symposium presented April 13 and April 14 by the University of Colorado at Boulder and The Denver Center for the Performing Arts.
Nobel Prize winning CU-Boulder physics Professor Carl Wieman, physics Professor Allan Franklin, and history professor and former Los Alamos resident Lee Chambers will join regional theater pioneer Zelda Fichandler, theater critic Sylvie Drake, scientist and author Lawrence Cranberg and production director Anthony Powell as panelists.Ìý
The April 13 session will be at the Donald R. Seawell Grand Ballroom at Speer and Arapahoe in downtown Denver from 2 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. On April 14, the panel will meet at the Eaton Humanities Building on the CU-Boulder campus from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Admission is free but reservations are required and may be made by calling (303) 492-1423 or e-mailing paula.anderson@colorado.edu. Both sessions will be followed by receptions.
The symposium is part of the Copenhagen Project, run by CU-Boulder's Center for Humanities and the Arts in cooperation with the Denver Center for the Performing Arts and the Denver Center Theatre Company. The project also includes an educational outreach partnership with Boulder's Base Line Middle School.
Winner of the 2000 Tony Award for Best Play, Michael Frayn's "Copenhagen" depicts what might have happened during a mysterious 1941 meeting in occupied Denmark between Werner Heisenberg, head of Nazi Germany's nuclear research, and his half-Jewish mentor and old friend Niels Bohr. Historians have debated about what the two Nobel laureate physicists discussed in their awkward encounter at the height of the race to build the world's first nuclear bomb, but few facts are known.
"Copenhagen" Director Powell said that each character is desperate to determine the others' true motivations, as well as defend his own life and ideals. "Their arguments back and forth drive the play and there is real excitement in it. These very human people need to prove a great deal to each other, and to the audience that sits in judgment of them," he said.
Copenhagen raises crucial questions about the responsibilities of scientists to science, society and state, Chambers said.
"As a historian of Los Alamos, I hope to be able to talk about some of [these] issues in the context of both the Manhattan Project and the continuation of the weapons program into the Cold War," she said. "I would hope to share what the scientists themselves say about their civic responsibilities and the tension between 'pure' and 'applied' science in the context of a weapons program."
Chambers lived in Los Alamos from age two to 18, earned a Ph.D. in American studies and came to CU in the fall of 1976. Currently, Chambers is using a National Science Foundation research grant to study Los Alamos during the Cold War.
Los Alamos was not unlike any typical American suburb of the 1950s and 1960s, Chambers said, but reminders of the Cold War were always looming. "There was this fence around the entire community, guarded by armed guards. And until 1957, unless one was 18 and had one's own security clearance, you could not leave or enter," she said.
Though no one talked about what went on at the top-secret laboratories, young people knew what was going on. "As children we had only a dim understanding of what was done at the lab - we knew they were in the bomb business but it was the 'elephant in the room' that no one talked about," she said. "It was a company town."
Nobel laureate and physicist Wieman said the play raises "lots of interesting questions, but perhaps suffers from a lack of appreciation for the culture of theoretical physics and how that colors the thinking and actions of theoretical physicists."
How physicists navigate moral and ethical dilemmas is "just like everyone else in this respect," Wieman said. "They pay precious little attention to such issues as they proceed with day-to-day work, but are good at rationalizing after-the-fact whatever moral stands they implicitly took."
Powell, associate director at the Tony Award-winning Denver Center Theatre Company, directed last season's productions of "Betrayal," "Hamlet" and "A Skull in Connemara."
Drake was born and raised in Alexandria, Egypt. After emigrating to the United States, she worked as an actor and director in Los Angeles and New York and eventually became chief theater critic for the Los Angeles Times. In 1994, she joined The Denver Center.
Fichandler is chair of the graduate acting program at New York University. She helped found Arena Stage, which in 1976 became the first Tony Award-winning regional theater company. Cranberg, a Harvard-educated physicist, worked at Los Alamos in the 1950s and has taught at several leading universities. A prolific writer and debater, he most recently mounted a campaign for the United States Senate in Texas.
For more information on the Copenhagen Project symposium, call (303) 492-1423 or visit . For DCTC "Copenhagen" ticket information, call (303) 893-4000 or visit .