Tag: Copenhagen

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Film Features Film/TV

The Greatest: Four Legends Gather in One Night in Miami

One of my all-time favorite plays is Copenhagen by Michael Frayn. The 1998 Tony Award winner tries to untangle the mysteries of a night in 1941 when German physicist Werner Heisenberg visited his mentor Niels Bohr at his home in the Danish capital. Bohr and Heisenberg had worked together to deduce the rules of quantum physics (known as the “Copenhagen model”), but now Heisenberg had a new boss, Adolf Hitler, who wanted an atomic bomb.

After a dinner prepared by Bohr’s wife, Margarethe, Bohr and Heisenberg went for a walk in the garden. But instead of wandering for hours, as they often did while working on difficult problems, they quickly returned to the house. Heisenberg thanked Margarethe and showed himself out.

Sam Cooke, Cassius Clay, Malcolm X, and Jim Brown walk into a hotel — (l-r) Leslie Odom Jr., Eli Goree, Kingsley Ben-Adir, and Aldis Hodge star in Regina King’s One Night in Miami.

Soon after, the Bohrs fled Nazi-occupied Denmark in the middle of the night. They made their way to America, where Niels Bohr worked on the Manhattan Project. Meanwhile, Heisenberg became the head of the Nazi bomb project, which never even came close to producing a working weapon. Neither man ever revealed what they talked about that night. Did Heisenberg try to recruit Bohr for the Nazi bomb project? Was he there to ask his old mentor to check his math? Or did he carry a warning to Bohr? The three people present went to their graves keeping the secret. Frayn’s play explores the possibilities, with the ghosts of the three people present reliving all the different interpretations of the events.

Kemp Powers’ 2013 play, One Night in Miami, tries something similar. On February 25, 1964, Cassius Clay beat Sonny Liston to claim the heavyweight boxing title. In the crowd that night were Malcolm X, Sam Cooke, and Jim Brown. After the fight, instead of hitting the legendary Miami party circuit, the soon-to-be Muhammad Ali retreated to Malcolm X’s hotel room, where they were later joined by Cooke and Brown. It was an unprecedented gathering of Black talent, and the weightiness of the evening was not apparent at the time. No one knows what they really talked about, but Powers’ script imagines an evening that is equal parts celebratory and foreboding.

Actress Regina King chose to adapt One Night in Miami for her directorial debut after winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for 2018’s If Beale Street Could Talk. King’s first task was casting four of the most recognizable people in 20th-century history. It’s hard to say who had the hardest job. Kingsley Ben-Adir, who recently played Barack Obama in The Comey Rule, portrays Malcolm X — which means he’s in the shadow of Denzel Washington’s astounding performance in Spike Lee’s biopic. Ballers‘ Eli Goree is Ali, a role that even the likes of Will Smith couldn’t pull off convincingly. Aldis Hodge, MC Ren from Straight Outta Compton, plays Jim Brown, a man considered by some to be the greatest player in NFL history and who went on to a 50-year career in film and television. As Sam Cooke, Leslie Odom Jr. at least has the advantage of a great singing voice, since he originated the role of Aaron Burr in Hamilton on Broadway.

Crafting these performances to perfection is clearly where King’s head is at — and rightly so. All four of her leads turn out to be stellar. Goree’s Ali is, improbably, the best of the bunch. He can both deliver the legendary bombast and reveal a thoughtful vulnerability in private. Ben-Adir’s Malcolm X is on the receiving end of most of that vulnerability. In Powers’ script, Malcolm X is the most morally ambivalent character, who intends to use the publicity surrounding his friend’s historic championship to launch his schism with the Nation of Islam. But it is Malcolm who convinces Sam Cooke to stop devoting his talent to sappy love songs and push socially conscious works like “A Change is Gonna Come.”

One Night in Miami lacks Copenhagen‘s experimental streak, but it functions beautifully as a four-handed character sketch of some of the most important Black men of the 20th century. (It’s undoubtedly more entertaining — when I saw Copenhagen performed live, half the audience left during intermission.) King’s cameras pace restlessly around the room, finding framing that keeps all four actors in view, as they would appear onstage. This is a film that carefully doles out close-ups, and more directors should heed King’s example. The film loses momentum when the group breaks up, and each character gets a little exposition designed to educate the audience on their historical importance. But when the four legends are together in the same room, One Night in Miami crackles with the fire of life.

One Night in Miami

Now playing Multiple locations

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Copenhagen closes at Theatre Memphis; U of M reimagines Macbeth

Once upon a time I described Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen as a “bad play.” Having gone back for a second serving, I’m comfortable standing by that initial pronouncement, with one allowance. When you submit to the script’s unreality and meet Frayn’s difficult material on its own terms, this “bad play” can make for a fine night at the theater. Thankfully, Theatre Memphis’ straightforward take on the atomic ghost story doesn’t force ideas as big as all of space into a vessel as unworthy as parlor drama.

And maybe it’s a “bad play” because, relatively speaking, it’s not really a play at all. There’s no conventional protagonist here, and the conflict changes with every pass at an uncertain story with no beginning, middle, or end.

Copenhagen is set in no actual place at no particular time. The characters — physicists Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr and Bohr’s wife Margrethe — admit to being dead, though it’s probably more correct to describe them as being “un-alive.” The author’s aim here is to project the simulated image of three historical figures across time and space to catalog possible outcomes of a 1941 meeting at the onset of a global nuclear arms race. At times, it resembles a WWII-era thriller, but Copenhagen is a genuinely experimental, steadfastly inconclusive, and demanding theatrical exercise.

Theatre Memphis’ revival — like good scientific process — requires some patience. It rewards that patience with smart performances by Jason Spitzer, Gregory Alexander, and Mary Buchignani. Director Stephen Huff’s clear, unfussy take on complicated material reflects the spirit of Bohr, the pioneering physicist who expressed complex ideas using practical examples and plain language. To that end, this Copenhagen is still probably more literal than it might be. The staging never takes full, fantastic advantage of the show’s determined anti-realism. But when the actors cook, it’s the atomic bomb.

Scenic and lighting designer Daniel Kopera has imagined a space that expresses space — and time. Three unremarkable black chairs sit in a pitch-black environment. Formulas and wave signs are scribbled in white (painted) chalk on the floor. The next dimension is made apparent when similar formulas are projected across actors inhabiting the void — actors who live, love, and hate on each other a little, in the imaginary skeleton of a rotting universe. An uncomfortable time was had by all.

That’s a good thing, if you ask me.

Few local productions of Macbeth have really wrestled with the play’s supernatural side or attempted to empower the show’s unapologetically demonic side with all the tropes of modern horror.

Although there’s probably a nobler intention underpinning the University of Memphis’ current production of Shakespeare’s Scottish slasher play, it is most successful in its ability to evoke the viral paranoia and apocalyptic tone of ghastly contemporary cinema. It does so using dense recorded soundscapes and group performance pieces with sexual and sadistic overtones.

There are no witches here, only a malevolent group force with many body parts, speaking with many voices and various intentions, none of them pure. This force physically injects evil into Macbeth and swarms all around his hellspawn wife like devil-gnats.

Mixing post-industrial scenic design with blossoms, boughs, and costume profiles plucked from feudal Japan, director Jung Han Kim has built a sensual feast that’s exhilarating but inconsistent. Presentational acting styles may leave some audience members longing for more coherent storytelling and emotional content.

The one real problem I have with Kim’s Macbeth — which really is quite an achievement overall — is that it ends with a whimper rather than a bang. So much sound and fury has been built into the show’s quietest moments that it has nowhere to go. The last battles, for all their choreography, are pastoral compared to the sleepwalking scene. And Macbeth’s head on the pike is accidentally comical.

I get the sense from past work that Kim — a director to watch — isn’t especially interested in traditional linear narrative. I also get the sense that this Macbeth might have been more fully realized without all those words getting in the way.

Categories
Intermission Impossible Theater

“Copenhagen” is Up to Snuff

Jason M. Spitzer, Gregory Alexander and Mary Buchignani portray real life characters in the afterlife at the center of a debate concerning memory, science and morality in Copenhagen, February 13 – March 1, 2015, in the Next Stage at Theatre Memphis.

Once upon a time I described Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen as a “bad play.” Having gone back for a second serving, I’m comfortable standing by that initial pronouncement, with one allowance. When you submit to the script’s unreality, and meet Frayn’s difficult material on its own terms, this “bad play” can make for a fine night in the theater. Thankfully Theatre Memphis‘ straightforward take on the atomic ghost story doesn’t force ideas as big as all space into a vessel as unworthy as parlor drama.

And maybe it’s a “bad play” because it’s not really a play at all. At least not in the conventional sense. 

Copenhagen is set in no place or time. The characters— physicists Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr, and Bohr’s wife Margrethe, are not alive. The author’s aim is to project the image of these three characters across time and catalog possible outcomes of a 1941 meeting at the onset of a global nuclear arms race. It resembles a WWII-era thriller, but Copenhagen is a genuinely experimental, steadfastly inconclusive, and demanding theatrical exercise. It’s comprised of exotic sub-dramatic matters, isolated for observation. And changed by it.

Theatre Memphis’ current Next Stage revival — like good scientific process — requires some patience. It rewards that patience with smart, award-worthy performances by Jason Spitzer, Gregory Alexander, and Mary Buchignani. Director Stephen Huff’s clear, unfussy take on complicated material reflects the spirit of Bohr, the pioneering physicist who expressed complex ideas using practical examples and plain language. To that end this Copenhagen is still probably more literal than it might be. The staging never takes full, fantastic advantage of the show’s determined anti-realism. But when the actors cook, it’s the atomic bomb.

Scenic and lighting designer Daniel Kopera has imagined a space that expresses space— and time. Three unremarkable black chairs sit in a pitch black environment. Formulas and wave signs are scribbled in white (painted) chalk on the floor. The next dimension is made apparent when similar formulas are projected across actors inhabiting the void — Actors who live, love, and hate on each other a little, in the imaginary skeleton of a rotting universe. An uncomfortable time was had by all.

That’s a good thing, if you ask me.