Interview: Denis Arndt Isn't Uncertain About This HEISENBERG Principle

HEISENBERG, shorthand for the Heisenberg uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics, is not your typical love story. Georgie Burns, played energetically by Mary-Louise Parker, is a 42-year-old woman with a penchant for embroidering the truth. Big time.

One day she sees 75-year-old Alex Priest, a butcher, played by Denis (pronounced Denny) Arndt, sitting at a train station. She plants a seemingly impulsive kiss on his neck. That kiss is the catalyst that nudges Alex into believing that love is still possible at his advanced age.

"He had absolutely given up on love and made his peace with it," said Arndt. When the random encounter occurs, he was smitten but kept his cool. "Love is a synaptic connection in your brain," Arndt said. "Alex doesn't talk about his emotional response to the world, he sees that as a problem," he added. "Alex likes the rational reality of how animals fit together and that cows have a seam."

"He knows where he is in time," Arndt said, "and he's no pushover. He's not searching for anything, he's there at the end of his life, there's not much time left."

Arndt, who grew up in Ohio, was attracted to this character because he could relate. He is 77.

"Maybe because I'm around his age," he posited. "It has a lot to do with this youth culture we have, and the July/December relationship was part of the attraction for me. I realized I was attracted to his vulnerability. What I saw was someone not full of defenses, but full of receptive acceptance. And it was chemistry between the two characters that drew me in."

Georgie, who claims to be first a waitress, or assassin, could be just working a con on Alex. But Alex is open to this attention-getting device -- the kiss on the neck -- however random it may be.

Georgie is an astute observer of life and a self-preservationist who is facing a personal failure. "If you watch something closely enough," Georgie says, "you have no possible way of telling where it's going or how fast it's getting there."

The play, by Simon Stephens, who also wrote the adaptation of Mark Haddon's novel THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME, explores the intricacies of romance at middle and senior ages. "We have a very bright, astute playwright going inside human relationships and it's evident in his words," Arndt said. "He's consciously giving us this dialectic between vulnerabilities and insecurities and fear as they are presented in both characters."

Alex hasn't given up on life, he's just conditioned to perform the actions of his rote existence, leaving him open but closed down at the same time. "We're both old men in a society that doesn't have much for old men to do," Arndt said. "He likes the rationality of how animals fit together and how he and Georgie fit together. He's almost stoic, not materialistic, certain about the spiritual side because he has a deceased sister he talks to in his dreams."

His character is a butcher, by trade, and Arndt knows firsthand about butchering meat. He's butchered chicken, rabbit, pheasant and deer. "It's a sacred act. With Alex you have to remember that it's very hands-on and a lot of scrubbing and making things sanitary and precise. "He thinks about the order of things-his refrigerator full of already cut stuff. He's almost like a woodsman: he uses sharp tools and cuts things up."

Enter Georgie, and his world is cracked open. "There he is, in a public place being confronted by a person who could be off her meds, maybe took crack cocaine, and all of a sudden he's kissed on the back of the neck. He assumes he's been mistaken for someone else," Arndt said. "But people are meant to be surprised at the train station. People are there waiting for some collision to occur.

"Alex is attracted in steps to Georgie, but he has little interior bumps he has to get over and doesn't know why he's going ahead with this," Arndt said. The onstage chemistry is palpable because of the consummate actor he works with. "She's an actor at the peak of her game and we have a common vocabulary of what happens in the human act of theater," he said.

"That's why I can't wait to get back to it every day we perform. And today I get to do it twice," he said on a recent Wednesday. One of his greatest influences was his high school drama teacher, Dale F. Brannon. "He was an incredible teacher. He was a stickler for the basics and he taught us how to use language correctly," Arndt said. "He instilled in us the appreciation of the power of words."

Arndt, a helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War, received Purple Hearts and a commendation medal for his service. He's acted in scores of television series and movies and is thrilled to be making his Broadway debut with Heisenberg.

"I've lived several lives and I'm one of the lucky ones who got back to what I was supposed to be doing. It's a comfort and a fear and I understand the hubris of it," he said.

"I'm always in three states of being: either getting ready to do it, doing it, and having done it," Arndt said. "The idea that death is so present in this play enhances our participation and your participation."

Heisenberg is a play for all ages, he said. "The older generations who come appreciate it as a hopeful reality, not a fantasy. The fact that it is being celebrated and people are hungry for it speaks volumes," he said.

"It's a salve on our national societal wound of this past year," he said.

Heisenberg is playing at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, 261 West 47th Street, through Dec. 11.