123 (2019-2020): Review: THE HALF-LIFE OF MARIE CURIE (seen December 3, 2019)

“Science, Suffrage, and Scandal”

Lauren Gunderson is a young playwright known for being perhaps the most produced American playwright of recent years, despite barely any of her plays being seen in New York; the only one I’ve seen, at any rate, is Bauer. She is likely to see her status remain stable when regional companies—especially those with missions geared toward middle and high school kids—get their hands on The Half-Life of Marie Curie, a two-hander now being produced by Audible at the Minetta Lane. 

Not that it’s a breakthrough play, or even a memorable one, by any means. What it is, though, is a well-crafted, 90-minute, informational dramatization of the friendship of two brilliant women of the early 20th century, scientists who made their mark in the face of great resistance from the patriarchy.   

Francesca Faridany. All photos: Joan Marcus.

These women—the entire dramatis personae of Gunderson’s drama—are Marie Curie (1867-1934) and Hertha Ayrton (née Phoebe Sarah Marks, 1854-1923). The former (Francesca Faridany, Black Panther), familiarly known as Madame Curie, was a Polish-born Frdench physicist and chemist who was not only the first woman to win a Nobel Prize but the first person, regardless of gender, to win a second, a feat that remains unmatched. Equally unusual is that each was awarded in a different field, physics and chemistry.

Kate Mulgrew.

Hertha (Kate Mulgrew, Orange Is the New Black), born in Sussex, England, to a Jewish family, was an outstanding physicist as well as an electrical engineer, being the first woman to become a fellow of the Royal Society. She was also a leading suffragette, who even spent time (like her daughter, Barbara) in prison for her protest activities.

Both women also made invaluable contributions to the Allies during World War I.

The Half-Life of Marie Curie, set mainly between 1911 and 1914, provides enough scientific background to highlight, in accessible terms, the women’s accomplishments, but is principally concerned with charting their strong friendship. It leans toward being hagiographically didactic, but serves nicely to humanize these women, who spend most of their time conversing not so much about their scientific preoccupations—electric arc lighting, the motion of sand and water ripples, the fanning away of poison gas, radium, x-rays, radioactivity, and so on—but about the obstacles they overcame to fulfill their destinies. 

This was a world where women still could not vote, where married women were considered ineligible to become fellows of the Royal Society, and where the Nobel Prize people asked Marie not to show up in person to receive her award.

Francesca Faridany, Kate Mulgrew.

Of primary dramatic concern is Hertha’s deployment of her earth-motherly warmth, spiced with an occasional “shit,” to support Marie, whose husband, Pierre Curie, died in 1906, when contemporary French society turned against her when her affair with the married (but estranged) scientist, Paul Langevin, was made public. The scandal, which had anti-Semitic elements, even though Marie was not Jewish, even drove crowds to vilify her outside her house. Much of the play concerns Marie’s depression, including her traveling to England to spend the summer of 1912 with Hertha in hopes of lifting the cloud that weighed on her. 

Francesca Faridany.

As often in biodramas seeking to include as many biographical details as possible, Gunderson turns now and then from conventional dialogue to poetic rumination to direct address, sometimes in the first person, as in this summing up by Marie of her later career:

I work and work. I travel the world. The girls come with me. The American president hosts me. I am a member of the League of Nations with Einstein. The Radium Institute grows and grows. I am still sick, always sick, but I accept this life because it is mine. Because you gave it back to me.  

Kate Mulgrew, Francesca Faridany.

By and large, The Half-Life of Marie Curie is a thoughtful, educational (the theatre was filled with high schoolers), occasionally humorous (for example, Hertha begs Marie for details of her sex with Paul), but barely dramatic look at the human side of two female pioneers. One of them, Marie, is emotionally damaged, proud, and not always ready to listen to reason, as when Hertha warns the pain-racked Marie that the glowing vial of radium she carries as a keepsake is dangerous to her health. The other, Hertha, is gregarious, aggressively no-nonsense, and even coarse, but she’s the friend every troubled soul love to have. 

The writing provides both stars with an incentive for first-class emoting, and both Faridany (using a heavy French accent) and Mulgrew (her accent British posh)—dressed by Sarah Laux in period-perfect clothes—deliver, although Faridany’s eternally self-pitying Marie eventually starts to grate. Gaye Taylor Upchurch directs them efficiently enough on Rachel Hauck’s sparsely furnished, elegant set, backed by dominating, translucent, latticework wall, and expertly lit by Amith Chandrashaker.

Kate Mulgrew, Francesca Faridany.

The Half-Life of Marie Curie doesn’t glow as steadily as Marie’s precious vial but it seems likely to have more than a half-life in the American theatre. 

Francesca Faridany, Kate Mulgrew.

A final note: present at the Minetta Lane the night I went was Alan Alda, the actor, who wrote a play called Radiance: The Passion of Marie Curie in 2011. An interview with him about the play is in this link.

Francesca Faridany.

The Half-Life of Marie Curie

Minetta Lane Theatre

18 Minetta Lane, NYC

Through December 22

60. Review of BAUER (September 4, 2014)

60. BAUER

 

 

Imagine you’re an internationally famous German abstract artist imprisoned by Hitler because your art is considered “degenerate.” Through the intercession of an artist-curator friend named Hilla Rebay, the American copper magnate and art collector, Solomon Guggenheim, pays enough money in 1938 to secure your release, enabling you to emigrate to the United States in 1939, where Guggenheim ensconces you in a gorgeous seashore mansion in the exclusive New Jersey town of Deal, buys you a spectacular Duesenberg to tool around in, and sets up a fund that will take care, via monthly stipends, of all your financial needs for life. All you have to do is sign a contract stating that all your work henceforth belongs to Guggenheim, who will open his new Museum of Non-Objective Art with your paintings, of which he has a large collection, displayed prominently along with the top avant-gardists of the day, such as Kandinsky, Chagall, Klee, and Picasso. However, not long after signing your name you come to believe that you’ve misunderstood the contractual stipulations and bound yourself to a Faustian bargain in which you see yourself as little more than an indentured servant. You thereupon rebel by choosing never to paint again. You die in 1953, and when Frank Lloyd Wright’s new version of the museum, now called the Guggenheim Museum, opens six years later, your work is relegated to a basement storeroom and your name gradually forgotten except by art historians.

This, in brief, is what happened to Rudolf Bauer, about whom an excellent recent documentary called “Betrayal: The Life and Art of Rudolf Bauer” was produced in 2005 (and recently re-aired on PBS); it was the inspiration for playwright Lauren Gunderson to be commissioned by the San Francisco Playhouse (in association with the Weinstein Gallery) to dramatize the story. BAUER, now showing in Theater A at 59E59 Theaters, under the direction of Bill English, who staged the San Francisco production and also designed its set, is an often tense—even melodramatic—
exploration of the ethical and personal issues involved in Bauer’s behavior. It presents most of the known biographical facts within an imagined confrontation among Bauer (Sherman Howard), his wife, Louise (Susi Damilano), and the artist-curator, Hilla Rebay (Stacy Ross), Bauer’s former lover, whose enthusiastic support of Bauer was largely responsible for Guggenheim’s extensive patronage. There never was a meeting of these three people, but, the possibilities of what might have happened had there been one, are rather well realized by Ms. Gunderson. Schiller did the same thing with Mary Stuart and Queen Elizabeth in MARY STUART.

Sherman Howard. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

All of the action, which takes place on an afternoon in 1953, some months before the 62-year-old Bauer’s death of lung cancer, is set in the Deal mansion’s disused, dusty, white-walled, coffered-ceilinged, tall-windowed studio, beautifully lit by Mary Louise Geiger. Louise, an Austrian who had been hired by Rebay to serve as Bauer’s housekeeper, and who eventually married him, has deviously, but with good intentions, arranged to have Hilla, from whom Bauer has been estranged for a decade, come to the mansion; she hopes they can be reconciled. Bauer, intensely angry at Hilla for what he believes to have been her machinations in getting him to sign the contract, refuses to meet Hilla in the home’s gracious drawing room, insisting they do so in this nearly empty space, redolent of his abandoned career; the seating here is confined to a shabby armchair, a board set on boxes, and the like. Louise, an attractive 50-year-old woman in a pale violet dress, sincerely wishes to make the meeting a success, even though she knows Hilla was once her husband’s lover. Hilla arrives wearing a chic red dress with a wide-brimmed black hat; her hats were a personal trademark, although this one looks nothing like the rather odd ones worn by her in vintage photos and film clips. (The nicely balanced period costumes are designed by Abra Berman.) Hilla wears her aristocratic background almost like another part of her ensemble, treating the eternally patient Louise with crushing contempt, as if she were still Bauer’s maid. (Hilla had written an essay in which she called Louise a prostitute, resulting in a libel suit brought by the Bauers.) Hilla, not realizing at first why she is there, has come with the mission of convincing Bauer to paint again, and goes after him with relentless determination, but Bauer resists with all his power, believing that to do so would mean abandoning his integrity.

Sherman Howard, Stacy Ross, Susi Damilano Photo: Carol Rosegg.

The ethical dimensions of the dilemma are turned this way and that, as Bauer and Hilla engage in a furious blame-game fight, replete with sniping banter, that introduces enough expository background to let us know how things have come to such a pass. Forgiveness becomes a major theme, but who is to be forgiven, and for what? Ms. Gunderson can be excused, in the interests of dramatic necessity, for some of the liberties she’s forced to introduce. It’s unlikely, for example, that it was directly from Hilla that Bauer learned that, after his patron’s death in 1949, Guggenheim’s nephew and successor decreed that the artist's work would be kept in storage and that Hilla had been fired as curator of the Guggenheim collection, thereby losing her ability to fight for him. Still, having her bring all of this information into their meeting definitely deepens the drama and makes Bauer’s desperation more devastating. Also, Hilla’s plan to have Bauer paint again never really clarifies how his doing so publicly could overcome his contractual restrictions; on the other hand, the play’s fantastical conclusion (about which, more below) offers at least a satisfactory imaginary resolution.

Each character is sharply drawn and expertly performed, including the use of German accents (with choice German phrases thrown in). Mr. Howard’s Bauer, a dapper, silver haired and mustached picture of elegance, in blue blazer and ascot, has a proud, imperious presence. He’s clearly benefitted from his financial comforts, despite his complaints that he hasn’t enough money for all his needs. Bauer comes across as impetuous, petulant, and angry, but always with the dignity and stature befitting his position. Mr. Howard is new to the production, but both Ms. Damilano and Ross appeared in the San Francisco staging. Ms. Damilano’s Louise is helpful, self-deprecating, and likeable, while Ms. Ross’s Hilla is convincingly direct and urgent, although the actress has a distracting tendency to charge forward and retreat. She’s also far slimmer than the physically imposing person she plays, who appears quite frequently in the Bauer documentary.

A smattering of Rudolf Bauer’s work is cleverly introduced during the course of the action via several striking projections (created by Micah Stiegletz) that spread across the stage, and, as alluded to earlier, the play concludes with a remarkable display of his artistry in a surprisingly phantasmagoric scene that abandons the play’s hitherto realistic style and boldly pictures the newly liberated artist slashing the air like an orchestra conductor as powerful brush strokes of color and form splash across the studio walls.

Apart from the premise of a meeting that never happened, and some artsy talk that borders on pretentiousness, Ms. Gunderson’s 90-minute intermissionless drama, which is not without some welcome caustic humor, makes effective use of a true story dramatic enough to sustain interest on its own. Still, the play does occasionally seem to wear out the thrust of its central conflict as Hilla and Bauer battle it out, calm down, and take up weapons again in an on-again, off-again tempest that gradually begins to seem stretched. Nevertheless, BAUER is a welcome arrival for those seeking an effective dramatization of a compelling tale with powerful moral implications, and for anyone interested in an introduction to the power of great abstract painting. Bauer’s work has slowly come back into favor since a 1967 exhibition at, ironically, the Guggenheim, which gave it an even more impressive showing in 2005. This play about his life will surely inspire many theatergoers to seek it out. 

Stacy Ross, Sherman Howard, Susi Damilano. Photo: Carol Rosegg.