The most pressing questions presented to a theatergoer arriving at The Half-Life of Marie Curie are about the playwright’s genius, not about the protagonist.
We know about Madame Curie’s legend, more or less: the radioactivity, the beloved radium, the Nobel Prizes, the Curie Institute, the leukemia. But what of Lauren Gunderson, the author? She is, as Slate recently informed us, likely the most produced living playwright in America, at only 37 years old. And yet her work has barely played New York. Marie Curie, which opened tonight at the Minetta Lane Theatre, is her first-ever New York premiere.
So we’re left to wonder: What is Gunderson’s atomic secret? And why has New York heretofore remained immune to it?
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★★ review here.]
In his Slate piece, author Dan Kois argues that Gunderson, whom he dubs America’s favorite playwright, has a few things going for her. She is, most basically, a fast, prolific, efficient writer and creator. She also specializes in a certain kind of play, usually based on some historical fact, usually with a modernly uplifting theme. She is, he suggests, perhaps too earnest. But he’s quick to point out that her work isn’t shlock. “It’s easy to imagine the shitty version of a lot of Lauren Gunderson’s plays, just from hearing their log lines,” he writes. But in her hands, he says, those log lines yield not-shitty plays.
I can report that her work is indeed not shitty. The thing is, anything at least decent, in New York, is never going to be shitty, not when you’ve got New York talent. Gunderson’s Marie, Francesca Faridany, was in the original New York cast of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which won the Tony Award for Best Play. Her second lead, Marie’s close friend and fellow pioneering scientist Hertha Ayrton, is played by Kate Mulgrew, the stalwart vet best known for Orange Is the New Black and Star Trek: Voyager. Her scenic designer, Rachel Hauck, did Hadestown and has an Obie for Sustained Excellence, and her costume designer worked on The Band’s Visit, a Tony winner for Best Musical. Several prominent recent Broadway counterexamples notwithstanding, it’s tough to deliver something shitty with a creative team of this caliber.
I can also report that Marie Curie is also not great. Some of that blame lies with its director, Gaye Taylor Upchurch, who keeps the entire evening pitched at the same screaming-at-everyone level. Also: Curie is poisoning herself with constant radium exposure, of course, but must she spend quite so much time writhing and moaning on daybeds? But a lot of the fallout is traceable to Gunderson’s script, which is, as promised, historical and moderately uplifting and more than a touch earnest. It can feel like a school play, an educational ode to STEM skills and female friendship, except with four-letter words (Hertha, or at least Gunderson’s Hertha, has a remarkably dirty mouth) and excellent production values.
In this half-life, we meet Curie after the death of her husband and partner, Pierre. It’s after her (first) Nobel, after her fame, and, importantly, after she has been revealed to have been carrying on an affair with a married, if separated, man. The French, for the moment, despise her, and so Hertha comes to the rescue. Hertha is an English electrical engineer; she is a similarly brilliant, similarly threatening to the male scientific establishment, and eager to take Marie to her summer home for some quiet time. (This is all, in broad strokes, historically accurate.)
The bulk of the play is spent on that summer, where Hertha, a passionate suffragist, argues for women’s rights, and Marie, a passionate kvetcher, details all the (true) ways in which she’s been wronged. In their conversations, we hear a lot about both women’s lives, both women’s accomplishments, both women’s challenges. But we just hear about them: We see none of it. Eventually, the summer ends, Marie returns to Paris, and we hear narration—more hearing!—of the remainder of their lives, especially Marie’s World War I efforts, in which she invents portable X-ray machines and then drives them herself to save French soldiers at the front. It ends with Marie’s death, and her legacy: her achievements, her children’s achievements, the beauty of her friendship with Hertha.
It is, as I say, a well-produced school play.
But! That might well be Gunderson’s goal here. Or at least her producer’s. The venerable Minetta Lane is now the home of Audible Theater, a space where “electrifying storytellers and performers take the stage,” as Audible puts it, for live performances that are recorded and then distributed by the Amazon-owned audiobook company. And The Half-Life of Marie Curie is, as Gunderson writes on the script’s title page, an Audible commission.
So it’s entirely possible she was asking to write a well-produced education film, entirely reasonable to think that what’s on stage is succeeding on its own terms. Those terms just aren’t New York theater’s.
The Half-Life of Marie Curie opened Nov. 19, 2019, at the Minetta Lane Theatre and runs through Dec. 22. Tickets and information: thehalflifeofmariecurie.com
