Comments (0) Best Ensemble Cast - 2010

Colin McPhillamy, Christopher Oden, and Elizabeth Dimon Copenhagen, Palm Beach Dramaworks

The three great actors of Copenhagen were not meant to play people, exactly, but rather their shades: Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, and Bohr's wife, Margrethe, meeting in a hazy afterlife and trying to reconstruct what may or may not have happened on a particular night in 1941. Bohr and Heisenberg were quantum physicists, and the models for this play's performances seemed to be the particles the men spent so much of their lives studying. Reconstructing that night, the actors zoom from one state to another — did they stand here? Did they walk there? Did they discuss this or that? — and everything about them, from their faces to their bodies to their voices, seems to be in a state of flux. Each of the actors communicated emotions forcefully without ever seeming to settle on any one in particular, and each spent the evening shrouded in irresistible mystery.