Before there was the Alliance, Atlanta’s flagship theater company (formed in 1968), there was the Academy. Founded in 1956 by the late Frank Wittow, who served as artistic director until his death in 2006, over the years it trained some of the best and most durable talents in town: True Colors’ Kenny Leon; Horizon’s Lisa and Jeff Adler; and other notable actors and directors like Chris Kayser, Rosemary Newcott, John Stephens, Jill Jane Clements and Mary Lynn Owen.
Wittow’s focus gradually shifted to educational and community outreach programs and away from traditional theatrical productions. For some three decades now, years will pass between one full-fledged show and the next. Indeed, if my memory serves, the troupe’s last formal presentation was a 2008 “Driving Miss Daisy.”
To see the riskier Academy Theatre staging of Michael Frayn’s complex drama “Copenhagen” might give you no indication of the company’s storied past. Mounted on a small scale and budget by an unknown director (Maggie McEnerny) and featuring three actors you may not have seen in anything else, it often looks and feels like the work of some upstart indie group.
The play is based on real people and actual events, but it’s told in retrospect by characters who speak to us from beyond their graves. “Lingering like ghosts,” each of them has his or her own interpretation of what transpired during, before and after a crucial 1941 encounter between two longtime friends and scientific colleagues who find themselves fundamentally opposed – about certain principles of physics with regard to developing an atomic bomb, but also about the political and philosophical implications of their research as World War II unfolds in Europe.
The half-Jewish Danish physicist Niels Bohr (solidly played by Curtis Krick) was once a mentor to his German assistant Werner Heisenberg (a weak Stuart Schleuse), who by 1941 is essentially, if reluctantly, working for Hitler’s Third Reich. As their intellectual and spiritual debate ensues, the mediator of sorts becomes Bohr’s wife, Margrethe (Lorilyn Harper is fine).
Frayn’s voluminous language is anything but plain, and it is to the credit of director McEnerny and her actors that the show maintains a dramatic momentum, when it could have easily stalled or bogged down in lengthy discussions about the differential equations and mathematical probabilities of Uranium 235 and Plutonium 238, or whatever.
The play’s other-dimensional framing device proves harder to navigate. It isn’t always entirely clear whether scenes are taking place in the past, the present or the future, or whose version of the story we’re hearing at any time, or even if the characters speaking are living or dead. In one breath, they’re setting up or observing a flashback from a distance; in the next, they’re right in the thick of the conversation.
Lighting designer Elisabeth Cooper could have done more to illuminate the distinctions, like she does in the show’s loveliest moment, when each of the three characters reflects on the tragic death of the Bohrs’ young son.
“Copenhagen” is an admirable undertaking, although it isn’t a wholly satisfying one. Especially coming from the venerable Academy, though, something is better than nothing.
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THEATER REVIEW
“Copenhagen”
Grade: B-
Through May 20. 8 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays; 2:30 p.m. Sundays. $5-$15. Academy Theatre, 119 Center St., Avondale Estates. 404-474-8332. academytheatre.org.
Bottom line: Any Academy Theatre production is better than none.
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