Two Lauren Gunderson plays are opening in Vermont this month, two weeks apart. Starting March 5, Middlebury Acting Company will stage A Room in the Castle, Gunderson’s version of Hamlet told from its female characters’ points of view. On March 19, Vermont Stage in Burlington will lift the curta in on The Half-Life of Marie Curie, which explores the friendship that sustained the distinguished scientist when personal upheaval threatened to derail her career. What may appear coincidental is, statistically, not surprising: Gunderson is currently the most produced playwright in the country. It’s the third time she has earned that distinction since the 2017-18 theater season — the fourth if you count 2022-23, when she and Lynn Nottage tied for the title. (The tally, compiled by American Theatre magazine, always omits perennial favorites A Christmas Carol and works by William Shakespeare.) Prolific San Francisco playwright Gunderson, 44, is also a screenwriter, musical book writer and children’s author. In December, Spruce Peak Arts in Stowe presented Ada Twist, Scientist Friends, a children’s musical for which Gunderson wrote the book. Last summer, Montpelier’s Lost Nation Theater staged The Revolutionists, a play about four bold women navigating the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. The two upcoming shows are the second Gunderson plays for both Vermont Stage, which presented I and You in 2016, and Middlebury Acting Company, which staged Ada and the Engine in 2019. Lauren Gunderson Credit: Courtesy of Tiana Hunter “She’s just a masterful writer,” said Laura Wolfsen, who is directing The Half-Life of Marie Curie. “Her dialogue is intelligent; it’s lyrical.” “She writes a huge variety of material,” said Margo Whitcomb, director of A Room in the Castle, “but largely she excavates women’s voices from history that have either been silenced, forgotten, vanquished or unknown.” Ada and the Engine features Ada Lovelace, an English mathematician and daughter of poet Lord Byron who is considered the first computer programmer. Other Gunderson characters include Émilie du Châtelet, an 18th-century French mathematician and physicist, in Emilie: La Marquise du Châtelet Defends Her Life Tonight; Olympe de Gouges, a French playwright and early women’s rights activist who anchors The Revolutionists; and American astronomer Henrietta Leavitt, who figured out how to measure the distance between Earth and stars, in Silent Sky. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Gertrude and Ophelia remain largely silent. Though they’re the only female characters in the play, their lines account for less than 20 percent of the dialogue, and they never speak to each other, said Whitcomb, who has directed Hamlet and played Gertrude twice. “They are completely tools of and victims of power grabbing and manipulation by men,” Whitcomb said. Their sparse lines leave many questions unanswered: Did Gertrude know that Claudius murdered her husband? Why would she marry him? Did Ophelia really drown? Gunderson answers many of those questions. Her play features only women: Gertrude, Ophelia and a handmaid named Anna, whom Gunderson created. In Middlebury, they will be played by Jena Necrason, Mads Middleton and Laura Roald, respectively. The production, Whitcomb noted, has an entirely female team, which is just the second she has worked with in her 40-year career. She excavates women’s voices from history that have either been silenced, forgotten, vanquished or unknown.Margo Whitcomb No knowledge of Hamlet is necessary to enjoy the show, Whitcomb said. Gunderson embeds snippets from the original play, which provides a sort of gravitational pull in the retelling. “It wants the women to adhere to that storyline, but they stage a rebellion and resist that narrative and pursue liberation,” Whitcomb said. Gunderson’s version is “really the story of three women who are of different status and different generations and isolated from one another, forming an alliance and a sisterhood.” Most of the dialogue is in modern English. While Hamlet is a tragedy, A Room in the Castle crosses genre lines, producing artistic director Melissa Stern Lourie said: “It’s got funny elements. It’s irreverent at times, and it’s very hopeful.” Gunderson’s reimagining doesn’t depict any particular time period. “It’s not in Denmark in the Middle Ages. It’s not in the Renaissance. It’s not today,” Whitcomb said. “It’s sort of all of it.” The Half-Life of Marie Curie, by contrast, spans a specific four-year period, 1911 to 1914, when the Polish-born French scientist should have been enjoying the height of her career. She was world famous, having won her second Nobel Prize in 1911 for discovering the elements radium and polonium. To this day, Curie remains the only person to receive the prize in two different science categories: physics in 1903 and chemistry in 1911. Marie Curie Credit: courtesy of Library of Congress But news of her second Nobel broke concurrently with that of her affair with married colleague Paul Langevin. Curie, a widow at the time, was painted as a foreign, Jewish (she was neither) home-wrecker. To distance the esteemed Nobel ceremony from the scandal, committee members encouraged Curie to remain in Paris, but she refused their request and appeared in Stockholm to receive her prize in person, then dined with the king of Sweden. The following year, weakened by kidney surgery and demoralized by the vitriolic gossip that overshadowed her scientific achievements, Curie traveled to the coast of Britain to spend the summer with friend and fellow physicist Hertha Ayrton, a healing sojourn that provides the majority of the play’s action. The two women were both mothers, widows and accomplished scientists working in a male-dominated field. Ayrton studied the electric arc and conducted experiments in hydrodynamics to explain the formation of ripples in sand. She was the first woman nominated to become a fellow of the Royal Society, the world’s longest-running scientific academy; the first woman to join the Institution of Electrical Engineers; and a suffragist. “Hertha Ayrton was this fierce personality,” director Wolfsen said. The Half-Life of Marie Curie introduces audiences to the lesser-known scientist as it explores the relationship between two brilliant women. Two actors fresh off Vermont Stage’s four-week run of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express will appear in the show: Chris Caswell as Ayrton and Alex S. Hudson as Curie. In modern times, when personal choices continue to be subjected to public scrutiny, Gunderson’s historical play feels contemporary, Wolfsen said: “It’s a beautiful story of resilience.” A Room in the Castle, by Lauren Gunderson, directed by Margo Whitcomb, produced by Middlebury Acting Company. March 5-15: Thursdays through Saturdays, 7:30 p.m.; and Sundays, 2 p.m., at Town Hall Theater in Middlebury. $15-39.The Half-Life of Marie Curie, by Lauren Gunderson, directed by Laura Wolfsen, produced by Vermont Stage. March 19-April 5: Thursdays through Saturdays, 7:30 p.m.; and Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m., at Black Box Theater, Main Street Landing Performing Arts Center, in Burlington. $34-54. Postshow discussion between Vermont Stage artistic director Cristina Alicea and Devon Jersild, author of Luminous Bodies: A Novel of Marie Curie, on Thursday, March 26. The original print version of this article was headlined “In the Spotlight | Showcasing women’s stories, two local theater companies stage Lauren Gunderson plays” The post Lauren Gunderson Plays in Burlington and Middlebury Showcase Women’s Stories appeared first on Seven Days. ...read more read less