HALF LIFE

HALF LIFE re-imagines the live and history of Marie Curie.

In real life, a young governess, Marya Sklodowski, was engaged to be married to Kazimierz Zorawski, a dashing mathemetics student, until his parents didn't approve of him marrying a penniless governess and he broke the engagement. Heartbroken, Marya reinvented herself as Marie: moved from Poland to Paris, enrolled in the Sorbonne to study science, met Pierre Curie and fell in love. They would go on to have two daughters, invent radium and win a Nobel prize. Until Pierre Curie would die a tragic early death, plunging Marie into a deep depression and setting off a tabloid spiral that would nearly ruin her career and end her life. But she would go onto persevere, winning a second Nobel prize, inventing mobile xrays to save thousands of soldiers in World War 1, and starting a cancer treatment institute using radiation to save lives. Kazimierz Zorawski would go on to marry Leokadia, a concert pianist, and have three children with her. But he would never get over the true love of his life, Marya, and spent his final days staring at a statue of her that was erected in front of her cancer institute in Poland.

All of that's true.

But what if Marya and Kazimierz had ignored his parent's wishes and gotten married anyway? Half-Life re-imagines all of their lives executing this premise, looking at the way Marya's and Leokadia's lives took different paths, as well as Pierre Curie, reshaping not only the course of these three lives, but of science and history and the world when the discovery of radium comes about entirely differently. And what happens, when Marya and Pierre eventually do meet, 10 years late, questioning fate and destiny and what it means to really love?