Word: playful
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...majority of the cast is dressed in casual street-clothes, certain characters wear distinctive outfits. The fairies in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” wear light, embellished dresses that capture their seductive nature perfectly. In the two most serious scenes of the play, portraying the sins of “Wrath” and “Envy,” the characters are costumed in formal wear that enhances the austerity of the scene. The stiff feel of their outfits reminds us that we are not meant to feel at ease when watching...
Thus, while the play does encounter pitfalls in its structure, it is still a pleasure to watch. More importantly, it reminds us that it’s not improbable fiction at all to fall prey to the allure of the seven deadly sins...
...most explicit attempt to address QM in literature can be found in Michael Frayn’s play “Copenhagen,” which imagines and reimagines the enigmatic meeting between physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in the Nazi-occupied Denmark of 1941. Heisenberg was working on the Nazi nuclear project (either on a bomb or a reactor—we still don’t know); Bohr was a Dane, and would later flee due to his Jewish ancestry. The meeting ended badly, and the two, once the best of friends, never spoke again...
...play is an admirable attempt to integrate science and literature, but it quickly descends into an endless pun about uncertainty—as in Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle—which the play itself never quite cognizes. The work suffers from an overabundance of mere observations of the ways human behavior can correspond with anthropomorphic interpretations of QM. This method is inherently problematic; the physics can really only tell us the outcomes of experiments concerning the quantum world. At best it allows room to imagine what subatomic particles do, but that has nothing to do with what humans...
This is exactly where Frayn’s play (which, for the record, I enjoyed) fails. “Copenhagen” outlines an “irritable reaching after fact & reason” as Bohr and Heisenberg search to accurately reconstruct their fateful meeting. But every time they get one part of the story down, another part becomes immeasurable—pseudo-uncertainty relations. The play ends with nothing resolved, the characters having accepted the “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts.” But it’s a stretch...