“I learned so much” and “That was so fun”: I don’t usually eavesdrop on exiting theatergoers, but I couldn’t help overhearing comments as I stood in the lobby of the Minetta Lane Theatre digging for my umbrella and MetroCard. It’s rare to classify a show as both fun and educational, but Lauren Gunderson’s The Half-Life of Marie Curie is just that—a 90-minute slice of history brimming with wit and wisdom, powered by two turn-of-the-20th-century female STEM stars.
[Read Jesse Oxfeld’s ★★ review here.]
Gunderson’s play focuses on the friendship of two-time Nobel Prize–winning physicist and chemist Marie Curie (Francesca Faridany) and engineer/mathematician/suffragette Hertha Ayrton (Kate Mulgrew), women united by their unabashed love of science and their constant battle for respect and recognition in their fields. However, when we meet Marie, her career is the last thing on her mind; she’s in the midst of a very public scandal involving a years-long affair with a married (but estranged from his wife) man, and the press is ripping her to shreds. Her friend Hertha has popped over to Paris to pick up the pieces—and to bring her back to England for some R&R. “You shoveled uranium ore for years in a shed, you can withstand this,” she says to Marie.
The women chat about their late husbands; Hertha reveals that hers, William, called her “BG,” short for “Beautiful Genius”: “It does make marriage a bit easier when your husband calls you a genius all the time.” They rail on the hypocrisy of the Royal Society—which awarded Hertha a medal for her work on arc lighting (she fixed it so the newfound electric lights wouldn’t make a hissing noise!) but wouldn’t admit her as a member. Hertha explains: “Actually because I was a married woman—this was the worst part—married women are technically property of their husbands and not legal persons under the—you know —law, and ‘we can’t have a person that doesn’t legally exist elected to the Royal Society because that would be an existential contradiction we cannot abide even though, because we are physicists, we have no problem with the contradiction that light is both a wave and a particle.’… God the shit we put up with to have a thought.” They discuss their children; Hertha’s, Barbara, is in jail after a suffrage protest, and she “couldn’t be happier.” They fight—Marie carries around a vial of radium, seemingly for comfort, and she fails to see its dangers. “You’ve been ill since the moment we met, you can’t breathe sometimes, you can’t stand,” says Hertha. “This prolonged exposure to a substance with permeative energetic power might not be helping.” As it turns out, Hertha is correct.
Gunderson—America’s most-produced living playwright—is a whiz with snappy back-and-forth dialogue, such as this late-night whiskey-fueled exchange. Hertha: “You had a scandalous international love affair and I am a lonely widow now can we please discuss the sex.” Marie: “You’re terrible, it was fabulous, leave me alone.” And she turns the final scene—which is really just a laundry list of the women’s achievements from World War I and beyond—into a rapid-fire discussion-eulogy hybrid. The interior-monologue moments—when Marie plunges into the ocean, for instance—don’t flow as well as the Hertha-Marie scenes, but something tells me they’ll be more successful for listeners: Audible will release The Half-Life of Marie Curie as an audio play on Dec. 5.
The Half-Life of Marie Curie opened Nov. 19, 2019, and runs through Dec. 22. Tickets and information: thehalflifeofmariecurie.com
