SOURCE: Wren, Celia. “The Idea's the Thing.” Commonweal 127, no. 12 (16 June 2000): 17-18.

In the following review, Wren asserts that the storyline in Copenhagen is obscured by the complexity of the abstract ideas being discussed.

Science has escaped from its ghetto, at least here in Manhattan, where laboratory-minted ideas and images are gaining ever wider currency. The theater scene, in particular, has been awash in theorems. Off Broadway, no fewer than three new dramas about mathematics opened in April and May, while the ambitious Ensemble Studio Theater was wheeling through its second season devoted to drama about science. On Broadway, audiences were flocking to Michael Frayn's Copenhagen, about the German physicist Werner Heisenberg and his “uncertainty principle.”

Heisenberg (1901-76) is not exactly a newcomer to the footlights, or to culture in general. Modern writers have been fascinated with the uncertainty principle, which states, roughly, that at quantum level (that is...