Lauren GundersonBesprekingen

Very funny and affecting. I'd love to see this one in person.

Gunderson is the master at highlighting the incredible accomplishments of women. This two-person play is about the friendship between Nobel-prize winner Marie Curie and the electromechanical engineer and suffragette Hertha Ayrton. Both women were brilliant and both fought against the sexism and absurd double standards in their field. The audible production of the play is perfect and I would love to see it live.½

There is no shortage of Pride and Prejudice spinoffs, and honestly I don’t tend to love them, but these plays are possibly my favorite! They’re based during a Christmas spent at Pemberley after Lizzy and Darcy are married. I love the character development and the way they capture the family dynamic. The servants in this one are great additions. It was a complete delight and I can’t wait to read the third in the series if I can find a copy.

Spring 2020 (Audible Original Dec);

A quick few hours audio dramatization of Marie Curie's life after her husband died, handling her affair and her Nobel Prize and one of her deepest friendship. Yet, what remains truest about this piece, is that it's about Marie finding herself and figuring out who she was without her dearest friend and how to go on forward. I always find myself loving learning more and more about her life.

Interesting, audiobook in conversation form.

Really good read. Incredibly inspiring.

Gunderson has become my favorite living playwright. This one is about a young girl with a serious disease who gets an unexpected visit from a high school classmate to work on a Walt Whitman project. This isn’t my favorite of hers, but she always has a gift for hitting some notes that resonate deeply no matter what the subject matter is. If you haven’t read her Silent Sky of The Book of Will I would highly recommend both.

Shakespeare’s friends decide to publish his complete works after he dies. Gunderson captures moments of grief and humor in such a beautiful way. She’s quickly become one of my favorite playwrights. Her characters spoke of plays and Shakespeare’s work with the same reverence and awe that I feel when seeing a powerful production.

“Laughter must be death’s greatest defiance I think.”

“Every day is someone’s worst. At least ours we had together.”

Surprisingly good for a free monthly Audible book. A quick program about the struggles of Marie Curie in the aftermath of some affair (she was widowed; Paul Langevin was separated from his wife at the time), right before winning her second Nobel. Her friendship with the British engineer Hertha Ayrton was portrayed as being key to her overcoming this (although in reality her assistance in WW1 in constructing and operating field x-rays to save allied soldiers at the front was probably more important in rehabilitating her reputation). Overall a very good book, and while I don't really care about the romantic life of Marie Curie, it is interesting how she interacted with her scientific contemporaries, and this is probably in other biographies.

Two years ago I saw this play performed and it blew me away. Reading it added an extra layer of depth to the incredible story of a real female astronomer, Henrietta Leavitt, in the early 1900s whose discoveries laid the groundwork for Hubble and others, but who is rarely mentioned. Gunderson is quickly becoming one of my favorite playwrights with her clever dialogue and ability to immediately connect with the audience. This pairs an inspiring true story with dynamic writing, making it one of my favorite plays.

In this sequel to Pride & Prejudice, Mary is witty and suffers no fools. I love seeing her character's development. Jane, Lizzy and their husbands are still very much in love. Lydia is still the worst and Mary finds herself bucking under all of her sisters' expectations and assumptions. It's clever, engaging, and manages to add depth to the Bennet sisters' relationships. I would love to see this on stage!

"You have a rare thing in this world. A choice. The most liberating possession of all."

"I meant specifically the company of my family. They tire me, you see. When I am around them, I find myself struggling to recall who I am, or perhaps I struggle against whom they expect me to be."

** Just reread this one and I think I'll need to make it an annual tradition. Just delightful!

This short audio book is a conversation between Marie Curie and her friend Hertha Aryton during a two month period she spent with her in England in 1912, It's informative, interesting, well told and well narrated by Kate Mulgrew and Francesca Faridany as the two women. It talks about her struggles when she fell out of favor because of an affair she was having and her life just prior to receiving her second Nobel prize. You'll enjoy this short (a little over 2 hours) true story.

The Half-Life of Marie Curie
By: Lauren Gunderson
Narrated by: Kate Mulgrew, Francesca Faridany
This is such a great play! It's a story of two friends that are both scientists, widows, and mothers. It follows them throughout the years through rough times, trials, happy times, and on until the end. In such a short time, the story made me feel their bond and felt part of it. One was fighting for women's rights, then they both worried about the war, both helped in the war effects, and both died too soon. A very touching story. I never would have thought about Curie this way, or her friend, if it hadn't been for this performance! Wonderful job!

How refreshing this play was.

Fantastic story and voice acting!

This book was entertaining, but the subject matter was so small that I was left with wanting to know more details.½

The Half Life of Marie Curie -Gunderson
Audio performance by Kate Mulgrew and Francesca Faridany
4 stars

This was an audible subscriber freebie. I haven’t been either interested or impressed by most of them, but this was very good. It is essentially a radio play, albeit one that is digitally downloaded. The actors portray Marie Curie, just after she has won her second Nobel prize, and the less well known mathematician Hertha Ayrton. The story begins with a distressed and depressed Curie attempting to escape the press after having her affair with a younger man exposed.

It’s a bit of herstory I knew nothing about. It’s a very feminist story. The audio production was well done. It made me want to read a more comprehensive biography of Marie Curie.

Marie Curie, a More Interesting Year*
Review of the Audible Original audiobook edition (Dec. 5, 2019) of the currently running (until Dec. 22, 2019) stage play The Half-Life of Marie Curie

The Half-Life of Marie Curie dramatizes a true-life episode from Marie Curie's (1867-1934) life in the summer of 1912 when she was being vilified by French society as the other woman in an affair with her deceased husband Pierre Curie's student Paul Langevin. She is invited to England to spend time with her friend Hertha Ayrton (1854-1923) to escape the stress of the situation. The retreat provides an opportunity for them to discuss their struggles as women and scientists in years when Ayrton could not even be given a degree by Cambridge University and Pierre Curie had to lobby in order to share the first Nobel Prize with Marie in 1903. The title Half-Life alludes to the radioactivity exposure that would eventually lead to Marie's death, but also to this turning point in her life.

The performances by Francesca Faridany and Kate Mulgrew were excellent in the dual leads. The performance was recorded under studio conditions without audience ambiance but with full stage foley and sound cues. Faridany performs Curie with a French accent, which most people would probably expect and accept. In real-life she probably had more of a Polish accent though.

The Half-Life of Marie Curie was one of the free Audible Originals for members for the month of December 2019. Playwright Lauren Gunderson was one of the initial group of 15 chosen for Audible Emerging Playwrights commissions in 2017, several of which have already appeared as Audible Original audiobooks.

*I couldn't resist this lede after the disappointment of Audible Originals' A Mind of Her Own from March 2019.

See a photo from the stage production at https://static.playbill.com/dims4/default/c0c724c/2147483647/resize/800x450%3E/q...
Photo of Francesca Faridany as Marie Curie (left) and Kate Mulgrew as Hertha Ayrton (right) by Joan Marcus, linked from Playbill

A look at the life and career of Henrietta Leavitt, one of the first of the Harvard computers, and the one who discovered the information that allowed us to determine the distance to the stars - and then was denied access to her own data because the men needed to use it to do the work she made possible. Well written, compelling, but with perhaps a bit too much emphasis on a love interest (I do not know if that is legitimate or added for the sake of getting the work staged; I don't know her personal story well enough). It's interesting reading the character descriptions, where Leaveitt's sister is described as "sweet", and then to meet a character in the story that is anything but "sweet". The woman had a lot more spice than sweet, which is not a complaint. A truly "sweet" character often ends up being boring, and this character wasn't boring, though she did try to dissuade Henrietta from following her dreams. I found this play much better than the work by this author on Emilie du Chatelet, perhaps because it was a bit less gimmicky (though there were gimmicks - that seems to be almost required in plays written in the last couple of decades of the last and the first decade of this century). The story was not swallowed by the gimmicks. Definitely recommended.

A play about two high school seniors trying to work on a presentation of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" for English class. The ending was too magic realist for me, but the middle of the play resonated with Whitman's poetry and the playwright did tie everything together nicely at the end.

A lightweight look at du Chatelet and her life in science and with Voltaire. The author has her weighing her legacy in love and philosophy to determine which matters more, and which is the most lasting. I won't give away the conclusion, but I will say that added a half star to an otherwise weak work. The techniques used in the work are interesting, but I think are a bit distracting, and appear to be more "clever" than engaging. Her contributions to science are well developed here, and that is a good change from many works on women scientists. Not great, not horrible, and it's a quick read.½

This work contains three plays, original works by the author. Two of the plays deal with science, one with the south, though the one about the south has little to do with the south and more to do with the relationships between three generations of women. The south is merely an unused backdrop to their road trip, which is unfortunate since the south is itself a fascinating setting and could have been more used. The works are slight, though enjoyable in a rather trivial way. They flow reasonably well, but they don't show any great depth of thought in character development or plot development. In addition, the author has an unfortunate habit of making synonym errors, antonym errors, spelling errors, and punctuation errors, none of which were caught by the slopping editing. This detracts from the reading, and in places makes it difficult to be sure what the author was saying. Can be a good way to while away a couple of hours, but don't expect much profound or scientific depth.½

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