So last week Drew's cousin, Anna, and I went to Berkeley to see my friend Chloe's play, Emilie: La Marquise du Châtelet Defends Her Life Tonight. Chloe was the director and she co-founded the theatre company where it played, Symmetry Theatre Company in the Berkeley City Club. The location is very nice older building with a Gothic feel to it. We had a little trouble finding it. We barely made it in before the curtain and had to squeeze in. We had to watch we didn't trip the actors as it was a black box set, where the audience is on the same floor as the set. It had been ten years since I'd seen Chloe, at the end of college but we went to high school together. She and I both did theatre but she was much more talented as an actress. She has performed all over the country since then. I brought my camera but forgot to get a photo of us together. It was great to catch up with her. Afterward they had a champagne party to celebrate the shows' success. The playwright was there. And she had bought out the house so we got in free! We enjoyed the play a lot. It's hard to describe it so I will let the experts do that...

As Rachel Swan in the East Bay Express described it:
"The real marquise was an 18th-century French mathematician and physicist who produced a robust body of work during her brief lifetime, including an exacting translation of Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica. She also had a long and tempestuous affair with the Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire, who famously described her as a man trapped in a woman's body (or in his words, "a great man whose only fault was being a woman"). She spends the bulk of Gunderson's play arguing with him about the principles of kinetic energy, writing mathematical formulas on chalkboards (with a quill pen, of course), and, occasionally, slutting it up. Even by today's standards, she was a true bon vivant. The fact that she did it in 18th-century France was nothing short of remarkable."

This review did a particularly good job of analyzing the play:
http://theidiolect.com/theater/inquiring-minds/

Congrats on the success, Chloe!!