This play started as a biography of the life of Lise Meitner, but has evolved into something much bigger. A relatively unknown name in science, Lise's life and legacy reveals a lot about how women have been, and continue to be, treated in science. Lise found a place in physics in an age where girls could not even attend school past the age of 14, and she went on to discover nuclear fission. Her work heralded the birth of the atomic age. She is the hero of this story, but this does not mean everything she did was necessarily heroic.

I want to feature Lise in this story because her story is one of someone that had to continuously re-invent and re-discover herself, both to find a position in her chosen field and to survive the Nazi regime she found herself inside in the thirties. She’s a great historic figure in science, having played a key role in the birth of the atomic age, and yet her story is complicated to tell because the discovery of nuclear science has so many messy and dangerous connotations. I think it is important to tell stories about women that show them for all their complicated glory, rather than just as “good” or “bad.”