About the Artist/Author

For 28 years Storysmith Susan Marie Frontczak has brought literature to life, created stories from thin air, and honed personal experience into tales worth telling again and again. She plays in theatres, corporations, schools, libraries, and festivals inter- nationally. Her Marie Curie presentations have taken her to 21 of the United States, Scotland, and Canada for over 190 performances. In dramatizing the life of Maria Skłodowska, Susan Marie pays homage to their shared Polish heritage. Susan, like Manya, enjoyed school, and promotes awareness that academic excellence can lead to outstanding achievement. Marie Curie’s perseverance in purifying a grain of radium from a ton of pitchblende, in part, inspired Susan to major in Engineering, a field in  which she worked for fourteen years before pursuing full time storytelling. Susan has always viewed both science and art as valid outlets for creativity. It is her aim to reveal the human behind the scientist, while placing Marie Curie’s life and accomplishments in a memorable historical context.

Program Description

Likely the most famous woman scientist, Madame Marie Curie (née Maria Skłodowska) changed the world in which we live through her discovery of radium and radioactivity. Through collaboration with the medical community the Curies discovered and established the first successful radiation treatments for cancer. Simply through her own passion and perseverance, Marie Curie opened the doors of science to women worldwide.

This program honors a preeminent woman of science: Madame Curie was the first European woman to earn a doctorate in the sciences; the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize (for the discovery of radioactivity); the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne; and the first person to receive a second Nobel Prize (a feat not to be repeated for another 50 years). Audiences witness the origins of scientific discoveries we now take for granted. They re-live the remarkable collaboration between husband and wife, Pierre and Marie, companion scientists.

This program honors the wife and mother, who felt more daunted by the chemistry of the kitchen than of the laboratory. As a single mother, Marie raised her two daughters from ages 16 months and 8 years, after the tragic death of her husband, Pierre. And it honors Manya's Polish heritage — much neglected not only now, but in her own life, to her own dismay. This program brings to light many of Marie's lesser-known contributions, both social and scientific — and the obstacles she faced along the way.

Marie Curie was, in turn, nervous and shy in public, obsessive about measurement, in denial of the dangers of working with radioactive materials, proud and possessive of her discoveries, yet generous to the extreme with the products of her work. Within her lifetime she saw the curative effects of radiation on cancer. Late in life she came to admit the dangers of working with radioactive materials. She died before the new understanding of the atom — initiated by her discoveries — produced the atomic bomb. Whether looking at Marie within her historical context or through the lens of a new millennium, this is a life that challenges our assumptions about what one person can achieve and the responsibilities of science.