Editor:
Last Friday night I enjoyed a MasterClass in a performance at Redwood Curtain Theater’s outstanding production of “The Half Life of Marie Curie.” Cassandra Hesseltine and Peggy Metzger, long friends in real time, found the perfect vehicle for the two stars to shine in at the 5th and D Street Theatre. The story centers around the real life friendship of Marie Curie, a physicist and Hertha Ayrton, a social reformer, who together shoulder through society’s turn against Nobel Prize winner Curie, in 1911, for having an affair with a married man. With just a few simple props these two women, alone on stage, gave a powerhouse of a performance taking on women’s issues, with tears and laughter, that couldn’t be more relevant, since last Friday was also a day of staged walk outs and protests against a White House that is currently trying to push women back into the 1900s.
My only complaint has nothing to do with the play, it’s that the theater was not full. We all still live behind the “Redwood Curtain.” We can not afford to take for granted the fine arts that have been nurtured and developed over the many years on the North Coast. I urge anyone who likes live performance to check out Peggy and Cassandra, the ladies who bring life to “The Half Life of Marie Curie,” you won’t be disappointed.
Richard Simpson, Arcata
This article appears in Needles and Ink.