‘Silent Sky’
Isabelle Grimm brings a totally delightful blend of insistence and vulnerability to the character of Henrietta, only the third woman to be hired by the Harvard Observatory to do computational tasks. Even though she insisted from the beginning that her profession was “astronomer,” she wasn’t permitted to look through the observatory’s telescope until years after she was hired and her contributions to the field had become incontrovertible.
Wearing a bulky allacoustic hearing aid, Grimm delivers Henrietta’s lines loudly — not quite shouting, but loudly in keeping with her character’s hearing impairment. It’s a nicely consistent bit of verisimilitude, unlike Gunderson’s use of contemporary idioms, which may lend the drama immediacy for modern audiences but sound badly inauthentic to those with an ear for such things. For example, late in the play, Henrietta’s research supervisor and former would-be husband Peter Shaw (Peter Warden) announces that a European astronomer has calculated distances to stars and galaxies by “plugging in” her formulas to his own work — distances far greater than had ever been imagined. “Plugging in” in this sense is a recent coinage and certainly not something that anyone would have said a 100 years ago. Even brilliant playwrights fall victim to the common assumption that if a phrase is in use, it must always have been so.
Henrietta’s feisty and opinionated colleagues and mentors Williamina Fleming and Annie Cannon are brought to roaring life by Pamela Ciochetti and Rachel Kayhan, respectively, while Alicia Piemme Nelson brings an understated complexity to the role of Margaret Leavitt, Henrietta’s longsuffering and somewhat manipulative sister who’s been left to care for their ailing preacher father back in Wisconsin. Warden, a veteran of North
Bay stages known for outrageous antics and overthe-top characterizations, has never been more subtle than he is in the role of Peter Shaw, a research administrator who vacillates between disdainful distance and emotional neediness in his relationship with Henrietta, and also with her co-workers.
With minimal elements, set designer Ron Krempetz has managed to create impressions of the interior of the observatory, a Wisconsin farmhouse, a ship at sea and other locations without requiring cumbersome time-wasting set changes. The vaulting arches behind the working women are all that’s needed to imply the observatory’s interior. His efforts are greatly aided by Harrison Moye’s lighting. Michael A. Berg’s costumes are period-appropriate and somewhat frumpy, as might be expected of academics toiling away a century ago.
Kudos to Bronzan for coaxing such finely nuanced performances from her five-member cast. All exceed the demands of this important story, one described in pre-show publicity as being about “the first female astronomers” — perhaps the first female American astronomers, but certainly not the absolute first. (You may wish to check out the 2009 film “Agora,” starring Rachel Weisz as Hypatia of Alexandria, the Egyptian philosopher, mathematician and astronomer who discovered elliptical orbits 2,000 years before Johannes Kepler.) While this “Silent Sky” isn’t perfect — what is? — its homespun quality makes it sweetly charming, while the depth of conviction shared by its performers makes it totally compelling.