By Jackie Demaline
The Cincinnati Enquirer

There's an important new American dramatic voice to be heard in The Love Song of J. Robert Oppenheimer, this year's Rosenthal New Play Prize winner at Playhouse in the Park.

The voice belongs to Carson Kreitzer, who uses the rise and fall of Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, for a speculation and reverie about science, religion, ethics, love, anti-Semitism, lust, conscience, the nature of obsession, war, and the device that changed the world forever.

Kreitzer has a huge vision and the perfect control to harness it. She also has a glorious sense of theater. In my decade of reviewing Rosenthal Prize winners, this is the pinnacle.

Astonishingly, Oppenheimer is even more. It is the rare work that achieves oneness between play and production.

Director Mark Wing-Davey is a master who illuminates and amplifies Kreitzer's complex ideas into theater that dazzles.

Oppenheimer starts at an interrogation disguised as a hearing: in post-World War II, Cold War America, should J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man who had been at the center of Los Alamos, be allowed continued security clearance?

Kreitzer explores the complexities of the man and his time, and to do that, she puts a demon voice inside his head, hissing with self-hate, with an eternity of pain and mockery at puny human flaws.

A great mind deserves a great demon, and Oppenheimer's is Lilith, breathed alive (but barely) from Hebrew myth, Adam's first wife cast out by God when she refused to be subservient.

What a splendid pair they are, Curzon Dobell and Judith Hawking giving the best performances seen on a Cincinnati stage this year.

Dobell provides a brilliant and romantic genius, spiraling downward personally as he achieves his place in history. Oppenheimer is a man torn by his attachments to his alcoholic wife Kitty (a riveting Blaire Chandler) and Jean Tatlock (splendid Carolyn Baeumler), the high-strung beauty who wouldn't marry him but would do her part for his emotional destruction.

Hawking as Lilith comes at her target early, her presence merely a mask-like face filling a series of video screens that surround the naked Shelterhouse stage from above.

When Lilith finally appears in person, Hawking presents a wheelchair-bound Fury, wrecked and pain-wracked. She spits out the many truths of America's 20th century and they sound chillingly like dirty little secrets.

The ensemble is pitch-perfect, with Steven Rattazzi also a stand-out in a variety of roles and Michael Pemberton a delicious J. Edgar Hoover.

Oppenheimer is superb theater, far better than anything at the Humana Festival of New American Plays in nearby Louisville.

If you love theater, see this play.

The Love Song of J. Robert Oppenheimer, through April 20, Playhouse in the Park. 421-3888.