By Cory-LaNeave Jones
February 4, 2025
You may think that a world-renowned physicist would have a plain two-dimensional chalk-on-blackboard type of life. The truth is that the life of Madame Curie was anything but boring and it took extraordinary strength and perseverance to meet the challenges of her day to succeed in developing new fundamental understandings of our physical world while withstanding the tumultuous adventures of living a life as an intelligent woman one hundred some years ago.
Can you hear that ticking? It’s the ticking of the clock. It’s the ticking of your heartbeat. Perhaps you’re standing near a radiating body and it’s the ticking of a Geiger-Müller Counter— an instrument that identifies the quantity of ionizing radiation (alpha particles, beta particles, and gamma rays) emanating from a radiating body.
Hans Geiger was the physicist that worked for Ernest Rutherford with Walter Müller at the University of Manchester in England. Rutherford was another pioneering physicist in the early days of the nuclear age. He created an “atomic model,” or a “nuclear model” that envisioned the smallest particles consisting of a nucleus, electrons and empty space. This model superseded the previous concept proposed J. J. Thomson that was called the “plum pudding model.” I bet you can guess what Thomson’s favorite dessert was. His model envisioned an atom as a sphere of positive charge with negatively charged electrons inside. He thought it would “look” like raisins scattered in the plum pudding.
The word atom was first proposed as a concept by the Greek philosopher Democritus around 460 to 370 BC. His works have not been found, but through Aristotle’s second-hand references, we know that Democritus was on to something. He was proposing that the smallest things, the smallest iotas, this thing that is smaller than the smallest “gnat’s ass,” were this thing called an atom. It was theorized to be an indivisibly small object.
Madam Curie continued working in the fields of chemistry and physics to uncover the mysteries of what is inside of an atom. Her experiments lead to the development of a theory of “radioactivity.”—since Thomson had already used all the desert dish names. I asked my old college friend, Dr. David Latimer, who is now the Physics Department Chair at the University of Puget Sound, what his take is on the importance of Marie Curie’s work on his research and on the larger world, and this was his response:
“Certainly, MC was one of the first nuclear physicists, laying the groundwork for particle physics. Or, you can go cheeky and say that MC somewhat realized the 17th-century alchemist’s dream: nuclear transmutation.”
– Dr. David Latimer (Rhodes Scholar who received his Ph.D. in mathematical and theoretical physics at Oxford University, that’s why he still uses expressions like “cheeky” even though he grew up outside of Nashville, TN)
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The Half-Life of Marie Curie was written by Lauren Gunderson, so you know it’s got to be good. They don’t go throwing around a title like “the most popular playwright in America” to everybody. American Theatre Magazine did throw that title upon the creator of what some folks call “Gunderland” – or the experience of walking inside one of Ms. Gunderson’s stories.
I’m sure nobody in their right mind, except maybe for Sheldon Cooper from the Big Bang Theory TV show, or perhaps my old friend Dr. Latimer, would want to go to a play that read like a physics lecture.
So, what did Gunderson do to generate a compelling story about such a seemingly one-dimensional character? She did some research, and discovered that Marie has a good female friend, Hertha Ayrton, who helped her when she was down and out—being harassed and chided by the science community when she began seeing a married co-researcher named Paul Langevin after the death of her first husband Pierre Curie.
The Juicy Parts.
Gunderson wove the tale about Ms. Curie’s affair and the public’s resentment of her after “the wife” bled the story to the tabloids. This threatened Curie’s career, because in France in the 1900’s, it was frowned upon for a woman to cavort with another woman’s husband. Not that it never happened. Jen Genet wrote a steamy play filled with plenty of mis-behavior in the 1950’s, The Balcony.
I had a chance to chat with several of the creators of the show including the director, Kym Pappas, the dramaturg, Kim Strassburger, and the costume designer, Claire Peterson.
Kym Pappas: Obviously Lauren Gunderson, our playwright, she is basing the play off of a real historical moment, right? But we don’t know the kind of conversations that they had outside of the letters that we’ve seen between the two of them. So, I’m sure she has taken some liberties in her writing. But we meet Marie at what I would consider probably the lowest period in her life, and I know if you’ve read the description of the play, or even just in the description that’s on the website, Marie has had an affair with another scientist, and it came out publicly in the newspapers. So, the community just completely drug her through the coals in that moment.
Lauren Gunderson does a really good job of presenting women’s stories in a way where we get to be everything. We get to be smart and angry and flashy. We’re not just one thing. I think this play is really wonderful because we get a deep dive into the relationship between these two women and how they think and feel about science and the world and their families. It paints a whole picture of a woman as opposed to just this idealized image that we may have of her as a historical figure.
I think that would be the very first thing that people talk about is her drive to find the answers. And that is discussed in the play. Listening to these two women debate and talk about their work is one of the things that I like the most in this play.
CJ: Hertha was also a famous electro-mechanical engineer who also studied hydraulics of waveforms. Gunderson alludes to her studies of the Navier-Stokes Equations without naming them. But her work was crucial in developing fan systems that would help clear gases out of trenches in World War I. And Marie also helped to get x-ray machines on ambulances to assist injured soldiers on the battlefield. They both did practical things, what do you think is the emotional core of the play?
Pappas: The heart of the play is their friendship. I think ultimately, this is a story about a relationship between two women and how they navigated the world that they were in together. It’s all the ways that we as people and as friends, hold a mirror up to each other. I love the fact that they call each other out, that they support each other, that they challenge each other’s theories. I don’t know. To me, it really feels like a beautiful representation, especially because I am a woman, of a female friendship, and how we support each other, how we live our lives together, the collaborative nature, and the love that exists that ultimately is the thing that gets us through the hard times.
I’m very lucky in that, in working on this material, I’ve got three really incredible actors to work with because we have our two primary actresses (Rachel VanWormer as Marie Curie and Leigh Scarritt as Hertha Ayrton) in the leading roles, and then Jonni (Garro), our Swing, who is learning both parts in case she has to go in at any moment, and they have all come to the table having done a lot of the work themselves.
CJ: She (Marie Curie) couldn’t fetch work in Poland (after finishing school). So, she found herself back in Paris, which is not a horrible choice.
Pappas: Right. So leaning into the French, because the one clip of audio that we were able to find of Marie Cury speaking, you can really hear the French, but also finding moments in the show where we hold onto the polish. So Rachel has been working incredibly hard on her accent.
CJ: Yeah. I mean, Polish for me. I never know how to pronounce anything that I see written. Even her name has that L with the cross in it. I don’t know how you pronounce that. Ska (cough), right? Or something like.
[Marie Curie’s maiden name was Maria Skłodowska]
Pappas: There’s a lot of locations (in the play) and it jumps very, very quickly and trying to find the balance between the realism and the surrealism, because as you know, you’ve listened to the play. There are moments, there’s an entire monologue that’s done under water. How does this, and it’s part of the reason why I said yes, because I didn’t know and because it scared me and I thought it was exciting. Right.
Kim Strassburger: (O)ne of the things that I love about this play is that there’s references to this early stage of radiation science and also the British women’s suffrage movement. And these time periods are kind of intersecting in, well, not kind of, they are intersecting movements.
Gunderson: Referring to the post script of a letter that Albert Einstein wrote to Marie Curie:
“Hertha: What’s this bit at the end?
Marie: Yes, he goes on about the statistical law of motion of the diatomic molecule.”
This was the most keen observation that most playgoers won’t catch the significance of. Diatomic molecules are made up of just two atoms (di-atom-ic). These molecules are known to have the most strong bonds on the periodic chart. They are ubiquitous as they surround us taking up the majority of the air we breathe, which is about 78% N2 (nitrogen) and 21% O2 (oxygen). Einstein added this post script to a letter wherein he provided support to Marie during the “rabble” that created “fabricated” “hogwash” – referring to the tabloid journalists attempting to discredit her intellect due to her bedding preferences. The play centers around the significance of two intellectual females who have both lost husbands (with whom they had strong bonds) and the bonds between these two women. It also refers to the bonds among intellectual people in creating honest conversations to learn about the nature of the universe and it also discusses the bonds between women who did not yet have the rights to vote.
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Fun Fact: A mnemonic device to remember the homonuclear diatoms is: “Never Have Fear of Ice Cold Beer,” wherein the first letters of each word denote the related elements that occur as diatoms, i.e. Nitrogen, Hydrogen, Fluorine, Oxygen, Iodine, Chlorine, and Bromine.
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The play is poignant in this current historical moment when the U.S. Supreme Court continues to side with the rejection of a woman’s right to maintaining bodily autonomy. Kim had some interesting tidbits about the actual methods employed by the patriarchy that attempted to reject the rights of women in England in the early 1900’s.
Strassburger: (T)he British response to the female suffragists in Britain was even more draconian than what happened in the United States. … the British suffragettes were more militant. They used disruptive violence a lot more, but they were exercising their rights to free speech in both cases.
CJ: Can you explain what forms of violence?
Strassburger: Some bombs that were associated with the British suffrage movement that weren’t in the U.S. However, the British authorities really implemented for the first time, forced feedings of these women in
/beat/
CJ: Sorry, you said forced. Forced what?
Strassburger: Feedings. F-E-E-D-I-N-G-S, Which were horrific. Now they’re described as basically torture. So, you can see, and these forced feedings happened really before the British suffragettes became more militant in their actions. So, you can see kind of a correlation between the more draconian measures that the British authorities took and this escalation of violence for the British suffragettes. But I do think it is, of note, however, that British suffragettes in the UK are heralded. I believe there’s a statue of Millicent Fawcett outside of Parliament, and I believe they’ve even named a new metro line of the tube in London, I believe it’s called the suffragette line. So, although these British suffragettes were more militant, they’re not really seen as the bad guys. Rather, the British authorities took some pretty awful steps to try to silence them.
CJ: Yeah. I still can’t put my head around what a forced feeding is.
Strassburger: I can tell you. So, one of the tactics that the British suffragettes used in prison to voice their resistance was that they went on a hunger strike. They wouldn’t eat. And the British authorities fearing, “Oh my God, what happens if these women starve to death?” Basically, the PR consequences, they would, it’s pretty awful, but here’s what it is.
They would shove a rubber tube up their nose and down their esophagus and without any anesthesia or without much care. And once that tube was inserted, pour a mixture of milk and eggs down that, and there was a lot of blood, a lot of vomit, and these techniques are widely considered now as cancer causing.
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Brutal.
I also spoke to the costume designer, Claire Peterson, about her work on the show.
CJ: What drew you in particular to this play, The Half-life of Marie Curie?
Claire Peterson: I really like historical fiction. That’s one of my favorite genres in general. And I also like this, what Lauren Gunderson, who’s the playwright does with this historical fiction is she has some things that are true to the period, but she also reworks it and contemporizes it. And what I find so interesting about a musical, or not a musical, about a play that is, it allows you to have freedom with the design to also contemporize it and reference things in the present. And I don’t know, I really enjoyed that. I also, of course, love a feminist piece of work.
I find that Lauren Gunderson tends to write these plays that are about very strong female historical figures who tend to get overlooked or vilified in a way, and it really humanizes them. So I was of course interested in that, and it makes it funny and fun. Yeah. So that’s what drew me to this project, is I’ve always wanted to work on one of her plays.
CJ: Are there any specific historical photographs, paintings, artifacts that influenced your design here?
Peterson: Yeah, for sure. I went with a lot of images of the women themselves. So, the two protagonists, Hertha Ayrton and Marie Curie are both historical figures. So, I used images as them to start my baseline project. One thing I observed about Marie, all the photos are in black and white, but she’s always wearing very dark colors. When you look at the fashions of the time period, it seems like she’s not following that necessarily. She’s falling behind in the fashion trends.
She’s also a much more practical person. So she would not be wearing a corset. She would not be dressing to the nines. She’d still wear a heed boot because that’s what you wear. But she wouldn’t be constricting herself. She’s very functional and practical. So I saw different levels of layers of lace. And she was a suffragette, which if you spoke to the dramaturg, I’m sure she talked about that a lot as well. And those women had a very distinct way of dressing, and I really wanted to reference that. And she also has such a boisterous personality. So for her, I was looking for something that stood out and was distinct and referenced the suffragette movement. And so I was drawn to images of her along with a lot of the other women who were fighting for the right to vote. …
In the script, it talks about radium burns all over Marie’s hands. And so talking with the director and the dramaturg of, okay, a lot of the images of these burns are black and white and grotesque, but they’re described as these black patches. …
So, she has all of these scars on her hands from how long she’s been handling it (the radium vials). It’s like a part of her. So, we had developed these things because it’s hard to do makeup on the hands. Now I’m off on a little bit of a tangent, but it’s hard to do makeup on hands because you touch clothes and you touch props, and you touch that. So, it comes off. So, I designed these temporary tattoos that she puts on before every single show that are the scars. And they actually look pretty good when you see photos.”
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I have another friend who works for Sandia National Labs over in Albuqerque, NM and he also had the same class that I had with Dr. Frank Parker (RIP) on Radiological Aspects of Environmental Engineering. Frank was one of the old-school engineers that worked with Oppenheimer’s team in Los Alamos, NM. He also had a bunch of stories about Albert Einstein and Hans Beta and that rag-tag group of physicists at the turn of the 20th century. He was also part of the international committee that assisted Russia with the proper final containment for the Chernobyl site. I picked up my old class notes (because I’m a hoarder) and they read almost word for word with the materials in the HBO mini-series Chernobyl. First you have the build-up of Xenon-136 in the reactor as they turn down for the test, then they have these graphite tips that acted as an accelerant that when lowered back into the reactor act not as an emergency stop, but as an ignition for a bomb.
Anyway, my friend from Sandia National Labs, Michael Enghauser, became a Health Physicist rather than a civil engineer, and his quick take on the importance of Madame Curie was:
“I think the coolest thing about Marie Curie is she persevered as a scientist in a man’s world and helped with the discovery of radioactivity. Also, every day I’m at work I use the radiological unit of Curie, which is named after her and her husband Pierre. I think that’s pretty neat over 100 years later. Arguably the name, Curie is the most common name associated by the public when discussing radioactivity.”
Shaping and molding nuclear energy is a complicated beast and that is why you don’t want any idiot with the nuclear codes, as resoundingly explored in Stanley Kubrick’s timeless comic tragedy “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” It turns out that Kubrick’s research was sound and even Dwight D. Eisenhower had doubts about the controls on our deterrent arsenal. Later, with the development of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), known as minutemen, controls were placed on these fireballs that were intended to be a fail-safe. Fail-safe was also the name of the documents that lead to these changes, written by a former insider.
The impact of nuclear explosions can be devastating, as shown in artist Ben Sakoguchi’s “Bombs, 1983” series. The work is comprised of 24 panels recreating photo documentation of atomic bomb tests, nuclear-armed ballistic missiles and aircraft, and keloid tumors and flash burns on survivors of the United States bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians.
The impacts of receiving regular dosages of radioactivity can also be devastating. Whenever you enter a facility with radioactive materials, they give you a card that measures how much exposure you are receiving while in the facility. They measure the man-hours, as they are still called. This is a way of regulating the health of employees at such facilities. We now know about the impacts of exposure, but in the original days of the research, these were not understood.
Following in the footsteps of Marie Curie, there are still good people continuing to do a lot of good work in the advancements of Science to develop more sustainable energy sources right here in San Diego. For example, General Atomics has a research and development team investigating the tokamak process to develop a nuclear fusion reactor at their D-IIID site, which will drastically reduce the amount of spent waste from the current fission type reactors that are used in power plants.
The play does attempt to address the fear of radioactivity as vocalized by Hertha’s character near the end:
“Marie: Half-life.
Hertha: Yes.
Marie: Radium, to Radon, to Polonium, to Lead to – …
And the… the work I did?
Hertha: It is respected. And feared.
Marie: Good. Alright then. One more experiment left.”
If you have a chance, check out this great show at New Village Arts in Carlsbad. Now showing through February 23, 2025.
THE HALF-LIFE OF MARIE CURIE
WRITTEN BY LAUREN GUNDERSON
DIRECTED BY KYM PAPPAS
SHOW DATES
JAN 24-FEB 23, 2025
NEW VILLAGE ARTS
2787 State Street
Carlsbad, CA 92008
