Emilie: La Marquise Du Chatelet Defends Her Life Tonight

La Marquise du Châtelet was a woman born in the wrong era. A brilliant mathematician and physicist, she was the toast of the Enlightenment. Nevertheless, she’s not a very well known historical figure. Voltaire got it right when he said du Châtelet was “a great man whose only fault was being a woman.” Now, Lauren Gunderson’s play Emilie: La Marquise du Châtelet Defends Her Life Tonight resurrects this fascinating personality. Emilie finds herself back in the world of the living, patting her body in surprise and wondering at the reason for her return. She soon becomes desperate to find out whether her challenge to one of Isaac Newton’s equations was correct. “I died thinking: Was I right?” she explains. “Shortly followed by: Was I loved? Shortly followed by: Does either one really matter in the end?” This smart, surprising and sexy portrait of a true genius is onstage at Wellesley College’s Ruth Nagel Jones Theatre.

“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.” – <em>Los Angeles Times</em>