‘Silent Sky’ plays as heavenly
Next Act delivers with its production about astronomy pioneer
Four years ago, Forward Theater Company artistic director Jennifer Uphoff Gray sent me a script she loved for a play called “Silent Sky” by a rising but still relatively unknown playwright named Lauren Gunderson — who is now the most produced playwright (after Shakespeare) in the country.
Two years later, I described Forward’s stellar production of “Silent Sky” — about an unheralded astronomer named Henrietta Leavitt whose discoveries first allowed us to measure the size of the universe — as one of the most exciting new plays I’d encountered in a long time. It landed on my year’s end list of best plays seen in 2015.
In a few more months, it’s likely to be there again, courtesy of the man and theater company who gave Milwaukee its long overdue introduction to Gunderson last year: David Cecsarini and Next Act Theatre. Featuring an outstanding Deborah Staples surrounded by an exceptional cast, Next Act’s rendition of “Silent Sky” opened over the weekend, under Cecsarini’s direction.
Leavitt — who did some of her growing up in Wisconsin — was among the women working in the Harvard Observatory a century ago who were charged with recording and cataloging the stars, captured by a telescope only the men were permitted to touch.
It was grunt work. But as Dava Sobel has demonstrated in her recent book describing the women who did it, these “computers” (as they were known) were too smart to stay confined for long within the photographic glass plates they examined.
Gunderson commemorates three of them: no-nonsense Annie Jump Cannon (a smart and starchy Carrie Hitchcock), Scottish-born Williamina Fleming (an alternately puckish and soulful Kelly Doherty), and Henrietta herself.
The latter is a role made for Staples. An intense and cerebral but also impassioned actor, she regularly gives performances channeling characters’ burning need to know more and love better than they do — trapped as we all are within the limitations of being mortal.
Hearing impaired, underestimated as a woman and dying much too young, Henrietta was acutely aware of how she was bound by space and time. As played by the inimitable Staples, it makes her intimations of immortality — and her unquenchable desire to know everything — all the more inspiring.
Henrietta’s boundless quest is offset by two characters, both treated with great empathy by Gunderson and beautifully played here.
The awkward and overly literal Peter Shaw supervises the women and falls for Henrietta; Reese Madigan shows how weak and conventional Peter often is, as well as the fundamental goodness reflecting his best self.
Margaret, Henrietta’s sister, embodies the ties of family, religion and tradition from which Henrietta must break free. Karen Estrada channels Gunderson in demanding the respect Margaret nevertheless deserves, in a play that expansively suggests the universe is big enough for all of us.
“Silent Sky” continues through Oct. 22 at Next Act Theatre, 255 S. Water St. For tickets, go to nextact .org. Read more about this production at TapMilwaukee.com.