TWTP Launches 2016 With Lauren Gunderson's EMILIE... Tonight

Evelyn O'Neal Brush stars in the title role of Lauren Gunderson's Emilie: La Marquise du Châtelet Defends Her Life Tonight, as Tennessee Women's Theater Project continues its ninth season of provocative professional theater with the Tennessee première of Gunderson's play. The production opens at Nashville's Z. Alexander Looby Theater tonight, February 19, running weekends through March 6.

Gunderson's play - her second work to be staged this season by TWTP, after last fall's The Taming - is based on the real life story of Emilie du Châtelet, a scientific genius of 18th century France. Women of her era were considered too simple-minded to understand mathematics or physics, but Emilie produced work ranging from a groundbreaking paper on the nature of fire (the first by a woman ever published by the Paris Academy), to a celebrated and still-used translation and commentary on Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica. She was married to a nobleman of the court of Louis XV, and took a series of lovers, including the writer and philosopher Voltaire.

In the play, Emilie is returned from the afterlife to recount and defend her life. With an ensemble of four actors, she replays her interactions with family, colleagues and lovers, and examines her unanswered questions about science and philosophy, life and love.

Maryanna Clarke, TWTP Founder and Artistic Director, says she was drawn to the play on first reading: "Emilie is a remarkable woman, and Lauren Gunderson has done a remarkable job of capturing her intellect, her passions, her humor and her intense appetite to understand the world. I really love its combination of clarity and reality-bending magic."

"Emilie tells us that human beings are always human beings. And love and hard work and hope and heartbreak look the same now as they did 300 years ago," Gunderson writes in an online essay. "That women have always had to prove themselves against harsher critics. That love is never easy. That brilliance is always sexy."

Using language that is easily accessible to today's audiences, Gunderson evokes the corseted world of upper-class women in the time of Louis XV, Clarke explains. "We see Emilie's eager desire for both scientific knowledge and unconventional romance. And, we share in her urgent need to reconcile her pursuit of love and learning," she says.

Evelyn O'Neal Brush leads the five-member ensemble as Emilie, with Obadiah Ewing-Roush as Voltaire. Britt Byrd (Soubrette), 2015 First Night Honoree Kaul Bluestone (Madam) and Evan Taylor Williams (Gentleman) assume a variety of supporting roles in the play.

Emilie: La Marquise du Châtelet Defends Her Life Tonight opens Friday, February 19, at the Z. Alexander Looby Theater, with evening performances Thursday through Saturday (curtain is at 7:30 p.m. for those evening performances) and three Sunday matinees (curtain is at 2:30 p.m.), with the final performance set for Sunday, March 6 at 2:30 p.m. Tickets range from $10 to $15, with the first Thursday show designated as Pay What You Make an Hour Night. Because of adult situations and language, the production is not recommended for younger audiences.

For group ticket sales, call (615) 681-7220. For further details about the show and for more information about Tennessee Women's Theater Project, go to www.twtp.org.

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