As rehearsals for Artemisia continued in advance of its world premiere opening next Friday, I asked Lauren Gunderson – an art history geek since high school – to name her favorite painting by the pioneering 17th-century artist her play will profile.

“I love Judith and Her Maidservant,” Gunderson replied to me via email, referring to Artemisia Gentileschi’s striking 1620’s masterpiece of the sword-wielding Judith, just seconds after she’s lopped off the tyrannical Holofernes’ head.

“It’s massive,” Gentileschi says to her lover in Gunderson’s script. “Taller than I am, and bolder than I’ve ever attempted.”

“The painting is confident,” writes Eve Straussman-Pflanzer in the catalogue to a recent Detroit Institute of Arts exhibit showcasing women painting in Italy between 1500 and 1800.

“One does not see indecision in the handling of the brushstrokes,” and Gentileschi “did not economize in her use of paint,” Straussman-Pflanzer continues. Gentileschi even used ultramarine blue – which, Artemisia reminds us, is as expensive a pigment as they come – in painting maidservant Abra’s skirt.

The picture shows “Judith at the height of her personal power and Artemisia Gentileschi at the zenith of her painterly prowess,” Straussman-Pflanzer concludes.

As Gunderson pointed out to me, Gentileschi’s Judith extends her free hand “out to us,” palm up in a gesture which “involves the viewer by almost telling us to hush.”

This is her story, Judith seems to tell us. We can watch if we’d like, but we’re not free to interrupt. Much like Gunderson’s pen or Gentileschi’s brush, Judith’s sword has created a new story, all her own.

As I noted in the first essay I wrote on Artemisia, which will appear in Forward’s playbill and which has also been published by Madison 365, Gentileschi and Gunderson share a career-defining commitment to portraying strong, multi-dimensioned women, taking control of the narrative to write a new kind of herstory.

Viewed this way, Artemisia can’t help but strike closer to home for Gunderson.

The gallery of strong women we’ve met through her plays include pioneering computer programmers and detectives, philosophers and physicists, politicians and judges, astronomers and revolutionaries.

But Gunderson rarely presents artists as main characters; when she has, they’ve usually been men (the most prominent exception is playwright Olympe de Gouges in The Revolutionists). In short, Artemisia isn’t just a really good play about a 17th-century painter. It also underscores the elective affinity between painter and playwright, each reading history slant and making it new.

Is it any wonder that Forward Artistic Director Jennifer Uphoff-Gray (who is also directing Artemisia) recently referred to Gentileschi as a “playwright,” much as Gunderson herself is a masterly portraitist?

The Legacy of Herstory

In taking control of the story, the Gentileschi we meet in Artemisia has an eye on posterity: how might she and the women she paints change viewers’ ways of seeing in the generations to come?

That focus on legacy has been front and center for Gunderson herself throughout her career. “Almost all of my plays are about legacy in some way or other,” Gunderson wrote to me. “Scientific legacy, artistic, personal and family legacy.”

I asked Gunderson how much thought she gave to her own legacy, more than two decades into a prolific career and now the most produced playwright in America.

“I’ve always been fascinated by what we leave behind, what we change over a lifetime, how we leave an imprint on the world,” Gunderson replied. “And of course all of this comes face to face with the ephemerality of life and how being known and loved are central to a life well lived,” she added.

As her answer suggests, Gunderson’s reflections on legacy braid the personal and the professional; each reinforces the other while offering intimations of our immortality through how we love and what we create. Among the things that attracted her to Gentileschi, Gunderson said, was not just this painter’s “blazing talent” and “passion,” but also “her life as a working mother.”

In Artemisia, art and life aren’t in tension. They reinforce one another, each making the other more textured. In Gunderson’s plays, the personal isn’t just political. It’s also indispensable to how we personally (re)shape the world through the stories we tell.

There’s a moving scene late in Silent Sky – the gorgeous Gunderson play about trailblazing astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt that Forward staged in 2015 – involving Leavitt and her sister Margaret.

Leavitt is dying in relative obscurity as she wonders whether and how she’ll be remembered – while suggesting to her sister that in becoming the mother she herself never was, it is Margaret who will leave behind the more important legacy.

Margaret – and, through Margaret, Gunderson herself – instinctively resists the idea of such a dualistic, either/or choice; whatever we do in and with our lives, all of us are connected and matter to one another and to posterity, in ways we can’t always see but which are nevertheless real. Such connections take the measure of how we’ve lived and the relationships we’ve built, through our loved ones and through our work.

In studying “relations among stars,” I wrote in my review of Forward’s production, “Leavitt and those around her . . . come into a fuller understanding of their deepening relations with each other . . . each character comes to see that however separate they may be in space, they can still inhabit the same moment in time, making each such moment richer for everyone inside it.”

Building a Legacy in Wisconsin

As I noted in my Madison 365 essay, it was through its production of Silent Sky that Forward and Gray played an integral role in awakening Wisconsin to Gunderson.

In conjunction with Silent Sky and once again at the time of Forward’s staging of Gunderson’s I and You two years later, Gray facilitated Gunderson visits to Madison, for public events associated with each production.

Long in love with Gunderson’s plays, Gray and Gunderson became friends; in a recent Theater Forward podcast featuring a conversation between the two, Gunderson noted that “you and I have a great relationship.”

“It feels so good to bring a play like this, to launch it somewhere special like Forward,” Gunderson said in a recent interview with Madison’s Lindsay Christians in the Cap Times.

“I feel like [Forward] is my second home,” Gunderson continued. “The absolute quality of the art – the artists involved, the actors, the directors, the designers – everything is just so well done. It’s really as good as the best theaters in America. I don’t think they will be a secret for long.”

In both the Cap Times interview and the Theater Forward podcast, Gunderson also focused on the “trust” implicit in any theater company’s decision to commission a new play – and, by extension, stage a world premiere.

“Because of your belief in me as a writer, so many people could get to see [Artemisia], across the country and maybe the world” in subsequent productions, Gunderson said to Gray on the Theater Forward podcast.

Spot on. World premieres of the sort blooming throughout Wisconsin during this heady moment of the World Premiere Wisconsin festival aren’t just about a spring awakening in the heartland. They’re about forging connections of the sort Leavitt once mapped; every resulting constellation tells a story about our relations with the universe and each other that lights up the sky.

That’s a legacy worth painting. And playing.

Artemisia runs from April 13-30 at the Overture Center’s Playhouse from April 13-30. For more information and tickets, visit https://worldpremierewisconsin.com/event/artemisia-2/.