Can’t wait another minute to tell you about the Nora Theatre Company’s absorbing world premiere production of OPERATION EPSILON by Alan Brody– the true tale of the top ten nuclear scientists in Nazi Germany captured by the Allies at the end of WWII and hidden away on an elegant English estate. Why? To find out how close they were to making an atomic bomb for the Fuhrer. The script is based on actual secret recordings of Hitler’s so-called “Uranium Club” led by Otto Hahn played by the elegant Will Lyman as the tortured Nobel Prize winner who first achieved fission– and was later tormented by its fatal consequences, and Werner Heisenberg played by Diego Arciniegas as the Nobel Prize winner who was certainly more unprincipled than his uncertainty principle would suggest.
The opening scene is a beauty– Janie E. Howland’s two-tiered set is a very English drawing room, all dark wood, garden doors, baby grand piano, and learned men making their entrances, sipping cocktails, and spouting exposition which sets up their credentials, rivalries, and quirks: Horst Korshing (Ross MacDonald) is a compelling wise ass, Kendall Hodder as Erich Bagge is a bundle of nerves and always hungry. It’s pretty efficiently laid out and feels like a reactor full of ricocheting egos as the pressure builds.
When headlines reveal that Americans have dropped the bomb on Hiroshima– the explosive news splits the scientists along moral and ethical lines. After witnessing the staggering casualties, some feel contrition for achieving fission, while others lament that the Americans have beaten them to it. The play is a meditation on that moral divide, fueled by antisemitism. It’s clear that some of these scientists–especially Hahn and the brilliant Max Van Laue played with great warmth and dignity by Ken Baltin were deeply disturbed by the moral dimensions of their work, that they had stayed in Germany, lending credibility to and working for a regime that committed atrocities. (The program’s supporting materials make clear that the Germans, ironically, retarded their own pre-eminence as a scientific superpower by expelling so many brilliant Jewish minds. Instead of “grasping the revolutionary nature of nuclear power” Hitler favored programs like training “an army of educated dogs that could read, talk, and write, and serve alongside German troops.” It’s a real eye opener in terms of the primitivism that informed the Fuhrer’s “thinking.”)
The production features a who’s who of local actors, who convincingly take us to a literal time and place I didn’t know existed, but wrestle with questions that are all too familiar and even more relevant now. It’s a simple play, really, that very clearly delineates some of the key issues of conscience that trouble us today– scientific inquiry versus its potential catastrophic results.
See OPERATION EPSILON by the Nora Theatre Company at the Central Square Theater in Cambridge through April 28!
[…] Operation Epsilon is based on the true story of 10 nuclear scientists in Nazi Germany who were captured by the Allies near the end of World War II. The German scientists, known in history as Adolph Hitler’s “Uranium Club,” include Nobel laureates Otto Hahn and Werner Heisenberg. The scientists were sequestered to the English countryside, where they were under surveillance and their conversations were secretly recorded. Portions of their actual transcribed conversations are included in the play. From Joyce Kulhawik (www.joyceschoices.com): […]
[…] Operation Epsilon is based on the true story of 10 nuclear scientists in Nazi Germany who were captured by the Allies near the end of World War II. The German scientists—who included Nobel laureates Otto Hahn and Werner Heisenberg and were known in history as Adolph Hitler’s “Uranium Club”—were sequestered to the English countryside, where they were under surveillance and their conversations were secretly recorded. Portions of their actual transcribed conversations are included in the play. From Joyce Kulhawik (www.joyceschoices.com): […]