Karen Zacarias’s Legacy of Light now at the Lyric Stage (through through March 13) stands out as one of the best female-led productions I’ve seen this season. Legacy ambles along in a Julie & Julia fashion: in the 18th century, physicist and feminist historical icon Émilie du Châtelet; in the present, another female physicist named Olivia. Both are at crossroads of motherhood and career. Scenes alternate smoothly and accessibly between the past and the present. Émilie du Châtelet has just found out she’s pregnant with a lover’s–the poet Saint-Lambert’s (Jon Popp)–child. Meanwhile, Olivia, knowing she’s unable to conceive, presses on her husband that it’s time to find a surrogate.
Émilie (Sarah Newhouse), at 42, begins to fear she will die upon childbirth. Her intellectual–and sometimes physical–lover, Voltaire (Diego Arciniegas) diplomatically suggests a centuries-old version of abortion. Émilie says no. Back in New Jersey, Olivia (Susanne Nitter) and her husband Peter, a schoolteacher, hire a surrogate named Millie to carry their child, and soon enough she’s pregnant. Olivia, increasingly absorbed in her work, begins to fear she can’t provide her child with the right kind of motherly care.
Émilie’s and Olivia’s fates and stories, for a moment, are in sync: a baby is coming, and a career still needs attention. Émilie is afraid she won’t finish her life’s work before the baby is born, and Olivia, having discovered a new planet, is regularly late to important doctor’s appointments with Millie. Shared between these two realities are parallels, and the play relies on dual casting to make the parallels work. Four of the play’s six actors have two roles, and the connections of character between timelines are numerous. Susanne Nitter plays Olivia and Émilie’s wet nurse. The slender cruelty is that in both worlds this woman is doomed to nurse another’s child.
The interchanging of timelines and scenes remind the audience that even though one woman’s story has passed on, it can still live on in another. And while the plot stands on a good deal of melodrama (it’s only funny when it’s not dripping with emotion) it is saved by strobing between past and present. The play is physically witty. The set itself allows for snappy dialogue: when talk of Isaac Newton surfaces, players stroll over to a prop apple tree with real apples and toss or eat one. You haven’t seen an apple eaten on stage until you have seen Voltaire eat an apple on stage.
Diego Arciniegas, Sarah Newhouse, Jonathan Popp
Voltaire delivers soliloquies to the audience that surpass exposition draped in wit, and he becomes a rapturous character to watch. He steals every scene with his Napoleonic strut and deadpan comic expressions. Along with Émilie, he arrives for a short time in present-day New Jersey, on a Capra-esque mission. It surely can be no accident that the most self-aware and fully-realized characters are Émilie and Voltaire. Alone, to the audience, he tells of his deep love for Émilie, how her work was not taken seriously until ten years after her death, and his years in exile. Arciniegas wields comedy as deftly as he does his sword when he fights Saint-Lambert.
It’s important to note that what is not lost in Legacy is what was obscured centuries ago: the important and noteworthy work of Émilie du Châtelet’s that challenged the collective understanding of energy at the time. Émilie, played with a beaming energy by Sarah Newhouse, speaks to the audience and tells her story herself, presenting the audience with a real feminist icon of eighteenth-century France. Parents, take your daughters to see this play.
Lyric Stage Company, as usual, does a lot with little: for being the oldest professional theater company in Boston, they occupy a notably small space, but utilize entrance and exit ramps to further the illusion of theater. One character exits in France in the eighteenth-century, and minutes later, emerges in New Jersey in weekend clothes. Roles are reversed between timelines. What one character deserved in France, he receives in New Jersey, centuries later. Zacarias makes no small effort to connect unrelated events–surely the work of a physicist (this is theater, so we’ll settle for simply a metaphysicist).
But that’s the point–more than bringing to light the mostly forgotten and overlooked legacy of Émilie du Châtelet–that by this illusion, the marriage of fact and fiction uncover delightful connections between the past and present.
Trent England lives in Cambridge where he is finishing his first novel. He can be found online at tengland.com.
