Glen Arbor Players present The Half-Life of Marie Curie
From staff reports
The Glen Arbor Players will stage their third production of the 2025 season with a play brimming with wit, wisdom and passion: The Half-Life of Marie Curie. The play was written by Lauren Gunderson and is directed by Bob Boles.
The play will be performed at The Leelanau School on two weekends: September 12-13 at 7:30 pm and 2 pm on Sunday, Sept. 14, as well as on Sept. 19 and 20 at 7:30 pm. Jean Jenkins and Janet Stipicevich will portray Ms. Curie and Ms. Ayrton, respectively.
Suggested admission is $10 minimum donation. No tickets required. Refreshments will be served.
The play opened in 2019 and has been described as “full of insight, great passion and humor.” The story celebrates the friendship between two brilliant 20th century female scientists-Marie Curie and Hertha Ayrton. The play won the Steinberg/American Theater Critics Association New Play award and was a finalist for several other honors.
Marie Curie was a Polish and naturalized French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. She was the first person to win a Nobel Prize twice and the only person to win a Nobel prize in two scientific fields. She and her family won a total of five Nobel prizes.
Boles directs this spellbinding play that, with humanity and humor, embraces history, science, and social issues still relevant today. It portrays the profound friendship between two remarkable early 2oth century women scientists—Marie Curie, played by Jean Jenkins, and her dear friend Hertha Ayrton, played by Janet Stipicevich—at a time in Marie Curie’s life so dark that thoughts of suicide might have overtaken her if Hertha hadn’t rescued her. In 1910, just before winning an unprecedented second Nobel Prize, widowed Marie Curie had an affair with a married fellow scientist and became the object of ruthless French gossip. Vicious attacks in the press probably had more to do with male jealousy than with moral outrage, but infidelity made her an easy target. At the play’s beginning, Curie’s historic career seems ruined until Ayrton, an English electromagnetic engineer and tireless suffragist, shows up at Curie’s suburban Paris home and convinces Curie to spend the summer at Ayrton’s English seaside cottage to escape the public eye, rest, and rekindle the fire Ayrton knows is still in her. During this visit, the demoralized Curie unpacks her life to her sympathetic friend and finds herself slowly restored and transformed. The vial of radium that Curie carries with her is a half-life metaphor. Half-life is a term for the disintegration of radioactive particles to the moment an element transforms so fully that it is more other than self, as Madame Curie herself does.
Stipicevich (Hertha) claims, “This play has a bit of something for everyone—science, suffrage, marriage, widowhood, poetry, laughter, tears, drinking, secret love affairs and talks about sex! But above all else, it is a story of friendship…. supportive, messy, true and lifelong.” The conversations Gunderson wrote for these characters will leave the audience wishing they too could talk like that, so articulate, insightful, sometimes quite funny, and even a bit obscene. Jenkins (Marie) says, “This is one of my all-time favorite plays. It is so beautifully written!” Both actors note the demands as well as the exhilaration of playing such intense characters. Stipicevich says each rehearsal is “a roller coaster of emotions.” Jenkins finds both challenge and fun in her complex character’s “wide range of emotions as she navigates through a tabloid-fueled personal crisis.”
Boles says that directing this play has been “one of the most delightful experiences I have had as a director. Jean Jenkins as Marie Curie and Janet Stipicevich as Hertha Ayrton, are both marvelous actors.” Boles also applauds the support from other GAP members and especially from Rob Hansen, The Leelanau School’s Head of School, and Kate Olson, Director of Alumni and Development, for their help to make sure “their facility worked for our production” even as they’re busy with a fundraising campaign to renovate the theater. “The energy surrounding the production of this play has been unbelievable on so many levels,” says Boles.
