Emilie
La Marquise Du Châtelet Defends her Life
Tonight
Commissioned by South Coast Repertory Theatre
World Premiered at SCR April 2009
Emilie Du Chatelet was an 18th Century French physicist, philosopher, notorious card shark, and lover of Voltaire. She died too young, at 40, after writing the still-used French translation of Newton's Principia. Tonight, she is back...Time and Space have given Emilie the chance to see her life again in an attempt to answer the question she died with... love or philosophy? Part biography, part romp through 19th cenutry science, part sexy historical re-imagining.
See the slideshow from SCR's premiere production!
Natacha Roi as Emilie in the premiere are South Coast Rep, April 2009
Matthew Humphreys, Susan Denaker, Natacha Roi and Don Reilly in Emilie.
photo by South Coast Repertory
Read more about Emilie in Dr. Judith Zinsser 's biography called La Dame d’Esprit: a Biography of the Marquise Du Châtelet (Viking 2006).
EMILIE article from Playbill.com:
Emilie, Mistress of Voltaire, Tells Her Tale in CA World Premiere April 19-May 10
"Negotiating the time-space continuum with the skill of an acrobat, Gunderson’s heroine takes the audience on a guided tour of her life and work. {...} The ambitious, non-linear experiment is a highly theatrical romp that literally crackles with electricity." LA/OC Examiner
"Gunderson possesses an antic imagination that seeks to invent its own rules. As soon as we’re drawn in, she shakes us and whisks us 10 or 15 paces ahead. A work of historical fiction, the play has much in it that is current and true, particularly the difficulty that brainy women have in gaining acceptance from their male peers and balancing intellectual ambition with emotional hunger." LA Times
