Angelica Torn stars in South Florida as Marie Curie in the world premiere of The
Radiant, part woman-in-a man's-world biography, part illicit romance and part tale of scientific discovery as befits the recipient of two Nobel prizes, one for physics, one for chemistry, both involving radium, the glows-in-the-dark thing that was heralded as a cure for cancer. The sciencephobic need not worry: the science is handled quickly and deftly in this play by Shirley Lauro as staged at New Theater in Coral Gables.
This is a something of a return engagement for both Lauro and Torn. New Theater staged the world premiere of Lauro's Clarence Darrow's Last Trial in 2005, the same year Torn appeared as Sylvia Plath in the solo show, Edge nearby in Miami. Lauro, probably best known for A Piece of My Heart, about women in war, calls this play "a psychological journey" into the life of the iconic Marie Curie (born 1867, died 1934). Time, events and characters are conflated, created and fictionalized in this play focusing on a relatively small slice of a big life beginning after the 1906 death of her husband, Pierre, and ending some time after receiving her second Nobel in 1911.
A four-person cast tells the tale, in two acts on a no-frills set, through a series of short episodes. Changes in time and location (mainly Paris, but also Normandy, Provence and Stockholm) are signaled mostly by the lighting and script, and also by music. The solo, deep-throated pre-curtain cello of the widow-in-need-of-a-job-at-the-Sorbonne first scene soon is replaced by cello with violin; the music preceding the second act seems downright floral, then a brightly lighted scene opens to sunny weather and love in bloom. Lighting is essential to this production, almost a character itself as it takes the place of set changes; it's designed by the play's director, Ricky J. Martinez.
About Curie: It was believed at the time that sunlight caused a glow to radiate from some rocks; that phenomenon was referred to as radioactivity. Work on radioactivity led to Curie's Nobel for physics. She posited that some specific entity within uranium, and not sunlight, was the cause. She called it radium, and chemistry students today might call it by its atomic number, 88, on the Periodic Table of the Elements, because Curie managed to isolate it. Isolating radium brought her the Nobel for chemistry.
Between the two events, she had a scandalous affair with a married scientist, Paul, who had been a student of Pierre's.
The Radiant appears to be still a work in progress. At least some of Torn's pauses on the second weekend likely were caused by searching for the right scripted word rather than for dramatic effect. But she does know how to work the dress. Floor-length black throughout, layered and textured to reduce its severity, it becomes a prop that radiates an imperious Curie or an ailing one as the scientist suffers bouts of what only long after her death would be recognized as radiation sickness.
Torn also knows how to calibrate her performance to the space, in this case a 100-seat theater, as does local actor Stephen S. Neal, who makes brief appearances in four roles: a paymaster, a professor, a Nobel functionary and Lord Kelvin (he of the temperature scale). Not so for the two actors making their South Florida debuts: Hana Kalinski, cast as Curie's niece, and Richard-John Seikaly II, who plays the married boyfriend. Both of them consistently hit excessive volumes. Kalinski's Katarina, 17 when we meet her, is full of pouty disappointments and broad enthusiasms, all loudly proclaimed. And sometimes it seems Seikaly's Paul speaks mostly in sentences that end in exclamation points. This hurts the production, because it's in Paul's scenes that we learn much of what's going on in Curie's life, but the lines are often too loud to be understood. And Lauro's episodic structure may work against the actors in this case, providing so many short arcs that the audience can feel it's being yelled at.
