Rogue Machine has celebrated its move to a new home in Venice by mounting an impressive production of Oppenheimer, starring James Liebman as the brilliant, tormented physicist, J. Robert Oppenheimer, popularly known as the father of the atom bomb. Written by the British playwright Tom Morton-Smith and first produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2015, the play tackles Oppenheimer’s life in a bold, full-frontal way: sweeping story, huge cast, video projection, dance numbers, complicated sound and lighting effects. L.A. has rarely seen such a generous production in an Equity-waiver theatre like the 75-seat Electric Lodge. The play’s early scenes introduce us to Oppenheimer in 1939, when he was teaching at Berkeley and, with the help of associates and students, investigating the complex nature of atoms and neutrons. At the time, Oppenheimer was also heavily involved in leftist causes: raising funds for the forces fighting fascism in Spain, opposing the Nazis in Germany, especially when he learned that Hitler’s physicists were also experimenting with the atom, trying to find a way to split it and harness its explosive power. Oppenheimer then devoted his life to developing an atom bomb before the Nazis did. Oppenheimer dramatizes the race with the Nazis in linear fashion: persuading FDR to fund a major effort to build a bomb, securing the backing of the U.S. army, building a secret base in Los Alamos, convincing a dozen-odd of the top physicists in America to relocate to New Mexico and live in spartan conditions for the next year or two while conducting their life-and death experiments. Among the members of Oppenheimer’s team were men like Klaus Fuchs (Rick Garrison), Haakon Chevalier (Scott Victor Nelson), Richard Feynman (Brady Richards), Edward Teller (Dan Via) and Bob Server (Mark Jacobson), all keenly intelligent but cantankerous free-spirits who rebelled against military discipline and, to some extent, against Oppenheimer himself, feeling he was too autocratic and aloof. The personal side of this monumental scientific and professional struggle is not neglected in Oppenheimer. We meet characters like J. Robert’s wife (Rachel Avery) and his ill-fated mistress (Kirsten Kollender), his communist brother (Ryan Brophy) and many others who were involved with him socially. There are parties, dances and bar scenes galore in Oppenheimer and J. Robert participated in many of them, but as the play shows he did so reluctantly. A somewhat cold, reserved person, he was also driven and harried for much of his professional life. He was not only under pressure to win the race against the Nazis, he had to stand up to attacks on his character and politics. Even though he had long before broken with the Communist Party, he was still accused by some on the right, like General Leslie Groves (Ron Bottita), his boss at Los Alamos, of slipping atom secrets to the Soviets. The same was true of the House Un-American Activities Committee which, after WW II ended, tried to smear him as a traitor. Mostly, though, Oppenheimer deals with J. Robert’s moral dilemma stemming from his participation in the development of the A-bomb. It seemed a good thing to him at first, a way of defeating America’s brutal, ruthless enemies in Germany and Japan. But then, as theoretical work on the bomb proceeded, he began to see the full extent of its destructive powers. It was a weapon that could conceivably blow up the world one day. Horrified as he was, he still pushed for it to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for scientific as well as military reasons. When he saw the devastation it wrought, he became a broken man. “Now I am become death,” he said, quoting Vishnu, “a destroyer of worlds.”
