SOURCE: Steyn, Mark. “Period Decadence, Emotional Truths.” New Criterion 18, no. 9 (May 2000): 45-9.

In the following excerpt, Steyn comments that Copenhagen effectively makes use of scientific principals to illuminate emotional truths.

Life upon the wicked stage, wrote Oscar Hammerstein, ain't nothin' like a girl supposes. I'll say. Seventy years on, as if to underline the futility of theatrical aspirations, there now seems to be a distinct actuarial disadvantage. A couple of years back, it was Jonathan Larson dying on the eve of his triumph with Rent. Last month, the author of James Baldwin: A Soul on Fire could have woken up and read a rave review in the Times of his first major New York production. Unfortunately, he didn't wake up at all: he had fallen into a coma and died later that day. Howard Simon was thirty-seven, more or less the same age as Larson.

When the fates...