The Half-Life of Marie Curie
by Lauren Gunderson

Off-Broadway

The Half-Life of Marie Curie Book Cover — The Half-Life of Marie Curie Cover

Highlights

Female

90 mins 1910s/WWI All Women Unit Set/Multiple Settings Period Costumes

Awards & Recognition

Drama Desk Award

Nominee: Two 2020 Drama Desk Awards

Synopsis

In 1911, Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her discovery of the elements radium and polonium.

By 1912, she was the object of ruthless gossip over an alleged affair with the married Frenchman Paul Langevin, all but erasing her achievements from public memory.

Weakened and demoralized by the press lambasting her as a “foreign” Jewish temptress and a home-wrecking traitor, Marie agrees to join her friend and colleague Hertha Ayrton, an electromechanical engineer and suffragette, at her summer home in England.

The Half-Life of Marie Curie revels in the power of female friendship as it explores the relationship between these two brilliant women, both of whom are mothers, widows and fearless champions of scientific inquiry.

Press Reviews

"It’s rare to classify a show as both fun and educational, but Lauren Gunderson’s The Half-Life of Marie Curie is just tha – a 90-minute slice of history brimming with wit and wisdom, powered by two turn-of-the-20th-century female STEM stars."
— New York Stage Review

"Written with insight, passion, and humor… [a] masterful script… with [an] engaging biographical narrative and timely historical message."
— DC Metro Theater Arts

Characters

Character	Gender	Age	Description
MARIE CURIE 44. Polish-born, French national. Brilliant, shrewd, private, and patient scientist. At this point she has already won her first Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband, Pierre, in 1903. She is the mother of two daughters, Irene (14) and Eve (7). She was widowed in 1906 when her husband died tragically.	female	90	44. Polish-born, French national. Brilliant, shrewd, private, and patient scientist. At this point she has already won her first Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband, Pierre, in 1903. She is the mother of two daughters, Irene (14) and Eve (7). She was widowed in 1906 when her husband died tragically.
HERTHA AYRTON 57. British. A brazen, ambitious, fiercely intelligent engineer, inventor, and suffragist. Widowed in 1908, she continued her work in electrical experimentation while secretly housing suffragettes running from police. Of Jewish origin, she became an agnostic pragmatist who changed her name from Sarah to Hertha after a Swinburne poem about a goddess of the earth.	female	90	57. British. A brazen, ambitious, fiercely intelligent engineer, inventor, and suffragist. Widowed in 1908, she continued her work in electrical experimentation while secretly housing suffragettes running from police. Of Jewish origin, she became an agnostic pragmatist who changed her name from Sarah to Hertha after a Swinburne poem about a goddess of the earth.