Curieosity: Running a Few Experiments, Literally
Blue Theater, through Dec. 7
Running Time: 1 hr, 15 min
Writer-director-choreographer Sharon Sparlin’s original work about Marie Curie and her fellow-physicist husband Pierre is as much a collage of performance styles as it is a dramatic endeavor. At its best, this iron belly muses production is refreshing, unexpected, exuberant, and highly creative. When less than its best, it’s confusing, loud, and the script more full of empty space than the inestimable distance between a neutron and its orbiting electrons. Still, exuberance wins out in the end, and you won’t see a more thorough use of a theatre space this season. From the brilliant surprise “attack” of Geiger counter-porting lab techs to the demeaning (for the Curies) chase for funding, to the frequent techno-decibel breakout dance numbers, Sparlin’s actors are on the go like atoms smashing inside a supercollider and spraying their subatomic anatomies in every direction, in all manner of presentational genres.
Choreography is a much-utilized shorthand for scenes of working in the lab, buttering up patrons at stiff tea parties, seeking a suitable dissertation subject, collecting awards and monetary prizes, and more. Sometimes the dances go on a bit without forwarding the narrative, but the cast is mostly uniformly in synch for the Gunn Bros.’ heavy beats and Sparlin’s big movement and sharp gestures. There is a sideshow barker-like narrator on a mobile podium, filling in the history while the Curies go about their science. There’s a pre-show video collage. And there’s the wandering audience: Wear comfortable shoes, because the action takes place all about the theatre, and there are no seats. Moving about the room to get a good view is a fine metaphor for the uniqueness of attending a theatrical event or interpreting history — as the narrator points out at the start: No two people see such things the same way.
What we don’t see the same way is the history of Marie Curie and husband Pierre as they chance to meet, pursue together their scientific inquiries into the atom and radioactivity, and kill themselves for their science, quite literally. Sparlin’s script doesn’t allow for much depth of character, relying more on commedia or music hall simplicities, but in Carla Witt, Marie Curie has a charming, personable interpreter with evident strength for all that running and dancing (and jumping through male-held hoops) that the character must perform. Greg Gondek’s Pierre is even less fleshed out, and there isn’t all that much chemistry between the two lover-physicists. Robert Matney is manic and amusing as the narrator, though sometimes it’s hard to understand his amplified monologues. Four other actors play pretty much everyone else; Matt Hislope, Madeline Lavrentjev, and G. Austin Wenning are equal parts caricature clowns and spirited movers. Gemma Wilcox joins them to create a busy quartet, when she isn’t playing Irene, the Curies’ daughter. The ensemble seems to run everywhere, and the cast’s energy infuses this play with a sense of desperation, as well as twisted fun.
Still, if it seems there is more kinetic energy than potential to this play, it just might be because the whole thing could have used just a little more time in the lab before exploding before a theatregoing public.
This article appears in December 6 • 2002.