A play about two brilliant woman scientists — one the subject of gossip so ruthless and cutthroat it caused her to flee the country — will be performed in Aurora.
“The Half-Life of Marie Curie” will be staged at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays May 10 to June 1 and 2 p.m. May 12 and 19 at the Riverfront Playhouse in Aurora.
The play is directed by Sean Patrick Hargadon. Last November, his theater company, the Janus Theatre Company in Elgin, staged the Chicago-area premiere of it.
“I’ve done some plays by Lauren Gunderson — she’s the most prolific, produced playwright in America. I came across this play and I couldn’t believe nobody had done it in the Chicago area at all. The opportunity came up to remount it at the Riverfront Playhouse in Aurora.”
It’s a two-woman play: Heidi Swarthout of Batavia stars as Marie Curie and Doreen Dawson of Naperville stars as Hertha Ayrton.
“It’s a wonderful story. Gunderson’s work is very positive and life-affirming and inspiring,” he said. “It mainly deals with people with different challenges and decisions they make in their lives and how they come out the other end. I really like that about her work.”
She loves to write about historical people, especially women, some familiar and some unknown, he said.
For example, we know that Marie Curie was a Polish and naturalized French physicist and chemist who, in 1911, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her discovery of the elements radium and polonium. On the heels of winning that prize, she was publicly shamed and maligned over an affair with a married man.
She was misrepresented in the tabloids as a foreigner, a Jew and a homewrecker. The chair of the Nobel Committee tried to stop her from showing up to collect her prize. The scandal took its toll and Curie went to England to join her friend and colleague Hertha Ayrton, an electromechanical engineer and suffragette.
“It’s really a story about these two women and a challenging moment in Marie Curie’s life,” he said. “Her husband had died, she had been cast out in society, she was trying to find her way forward and Hertha helped her by basically stealing her away from France and taking her to England where she could retool and regroup. It’s a real lovely, small chamber play.
“It’s got a lot of interesting ideas in it and talks about the things they discovered. Marie Curie at this time was definitely dealing with radium poisoning but she kept going. Hertha’s husband had passed in recent years but she kept plowing forward. They were very much ahead of their time in terms of everything they accomplished in a man’s world.”
Curie was not only the first woman to win the Nobel Prize, she was the first person ever to win it twice and the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two scientific fields. Her scientific legacy is extremely significant.
“It’s a really lovely story with these two people during a short period in their lives,” he said. “And the challenges Marie faces, can she move forward, what’s she going to do. Obviously, they have a moment where there’s a falling out and there’s a moment where they come together. And in very Gunderson fashion, there’s a whole thing about what they accomplish as time moves forward.”
He thinks audiences will not only love the story but also appreciate the lives of these two women and the history they made.
“It’s funny, it’s heartwarming, it also deals with how do you rise above adversity and how do you move forward when you have a loss in your life,” he said. “It checks off a lot of boxes. Gunderson is an excellent playwright.
“She really knows how to make people accessible and how to take historical figures and make them sound like today and immediate. I think audiences will really enjoy that. It’s also quite humorous and really engaging.”
Swarthout and Dawson are excellent in the roles, he said.
“They’re very experienced,” he said. “It’s a lot for two actors to carry but they do it with a lot of style and a lot of grace and a lot of humanity.”
Annie Alleman is a freelance reporter for the Beacon-News.
‘The Half-Life of Marie Curie’
When: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays May 10-June 1 and 2 p.m. May 12 and 19
Where: Riverfront Playhouse, 11 S. Water St., Aurora
Tickets: $18-$20
Information: 630-897-9496; riverfrontplayhouse.com
