This story is featured in CityBeat’s March 6 print edition.
If Alan Turing’s name is familiar to you, it’s probably because you saw Benedict Cumberbatch in The Imitation Game a decade ago. Winner of the 2015 Academy Award for its “adapted screenplay,” the film was based on Andrew Hodges’s biography, Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983). Cumberbatch was nominated for an Oscar for his portrait of Turing (1912-1954), the mathematician and cryptanalyst who cracked the German military and naval ciphers during World War II. He also later devised an “automatic computing engine,” the forerunner of modern computers. Turing was a complicated, eccentric genius who also happened to be gay in the mid-20th century when homosexuality was a punishable crime in England, a circumstance that seriously affected the last years of his life. The portrayal of Turing in the movie’s award-winning screenplay actually took a lot of liberties with the real man.
For a deeper, more accurate insight into this brilliant man, you might want to attend Falcon Theatre’s adaptation of Breaking the Code, a 1986 play by Hugh Whitemore, which was also adapted from Hodges’s biography of the scientist. The play’s title has a double meaning: Of course, Turing broke the wartime Enigma Code, a breakthrough that certainly saved thousands of lives since it enabled the Allies to win the Battle of the Atlantic and end the war sooner than might have happened otherwise. But he also “broke” the law by pursuing a gay relationship, ultimately being driven to suicide by his punishment, a different, complex “enigma” to be explored and understood.
Breaking the Code is the current production at Falcon Theatre through the end of the month, staged by veteran local director Ed Cohen. He explains that the play more accurately portrays the man, “the story of who he was, how he saw things, and then what else really happened to him.” In a recent phone interview with CityBeat, Cohen said in Whitemore’s play, Turing’s code-breaking work is almost an afterthought. “What this play is really about is truth, the belief in mathematics, that mathematics can define the truth. I think Turing is saying the opposite, that you can’t define truth, and math can’t either. It’s always a matter of point of view.”
Turing inadvertently revealed to a policeman that he was a homosexual. “He voluntarily admitted to a crime,” Cohen said, “and he was prosecuted. It ended up ruining his life when his punishment required undergoing hormone treatments to ‘cure’ him.”
“What I find really interesting,” Cohen added, “is that if he had done that eight years earlier, he would never have solved the Enigma Code, and who knows what would have happened with World War II.”
Cohen has a lot of directing experience with Cincinnati area community theaters. He previously directed Breaking the Code when it was staged at Northern Kentucky University in 2008, the only other time it’s been produced locally. Cohen, an attorney with a local firm, is also an adjunct theater instructor at NKU; this term he’s teaching script analysis.
Breaking the Code was his first opportunity to be part of a college drama program, and it opened the doors to other options, including Falcon Theatre, which operates at a more professional level. When artistic director Ted Weil, who has hired Cohen for several Falcon productions, was putting together the current season, he asked which show he’d like to stage, and Cohen was quick to sign on for this one. “I was happy to be revisiting it,” he said. “Maybe now being older and wiser, I might have better ideas.” He likes putting together shows for Falcon. “Their audience likes a bigger variety of material than other theaters. They don’t have to be quite as commercial. They’ve got 75 seats, and they can fill them with people who enjoy this kind of material.”
Cohen calls Breaking the Code an interesting play. The role of Turing will be played by Rick Grant, who earned a degree in acting from UC’s College-Conservatory of Music before going on to earn a doctorate in psychology. Today he’s a clinical psychologist, but Cohen says, “He’s making an effort to get back to acting again.” His training in psychology certainly adds an element of understanding to playing Turing, who took his own life at the age of 41 in 1954.
The show has other actors in the cast. “But at its core, it’s really kind of a one-person show with eight other people floating around. … It takes place primarily inside of the head of a genius that none of us can understand.” He believes that calls for an unrealistic approach. “Everything will be expressed very abstractly. I want to really emphasize that this is about him and the dilemma that goes on by being a genius in a world that doesn’t adapt to him very well.” The play shifts fluidly between three time periods: When Turing was a teenager, when he worked at Bletchley Park on solving the Enigma Code and in the ‘50s when he was dealing with his prosecution and punishment.
The essence of this play, according to Cohen is that “what’s true and what the rules are always matters from one’s point of view. The striving for mathematics is the ability to find truth. Turing found that lacking, too, because mathematics ultimately doesn’t tell the truth. He developed a machine that he hoped will remove some of the variables, in part an effort to find the logical truth in the world.” There’s a lot of talking in this two-and-a-half-hour play, but Cohen believes, “It has a lot to say. It’s a really fascinating story.”
Breaking the Code runs from March 15-30 at Falcon Theatre. Info: falcontheater.net.
This article appears in Feb 21 – Mar 5, 2024.
