Dim lights rise in the Black Box Theater, furnished with two wooden platforms, an upright piano, and a short, circular stage painted with a map of the night sky. The audience surrounds the thrust stage on three sides. A woman in Edwardian clothing with an old-fashioned hearing aid around her neck enters the stage and stands on the star chart, gazing upwards.
“The science of light on high,” she says. “Of all that is far-off and lonely and stuck in the deepest dark of space. Dark but for billions and billions of… exceptions.”
One by one, lightbulbs glow gold, hung at various heights above the stage. Henrietta Leavitt smiles up at them, saying, “And I insist on the exceptional.”
Lauren Gunderson’s Silent Sky opened in the Janet Kinghorn Bernhard (JKB)’s Black Box on October 15, directed by Dennis Schebetta and starring Erin Arnold as Henrietta, Emma Froelich as her sister Margaret, Will Davis-Kay as Peter Shaw, Gigi Brown as Annie Jump Cannon, and Mary MacKeen as Williamina Fleming. Inspired by the life of astronomer Henrietta Leavitt, Gunderson’s 2015 play explores the place of a woman in science and in society in the early 20th century.
In Silent Sky, Henrietta leaves her Wisconsin family to work at the Harvard Observatory and pursue her dream career in astronomy, only to find that her job doesn’t involve touching a telescope at all. Instead, she and her fellow female “computers” Annie Jump Cannon and Williamina Fleming, both real historical figures, catalog stars printed on glass plates from the telescope that the men at the observatory use.
Henrietta has loftier goals than filling out ledgers, though: after years of studying Cepheid variable stars that pulse mysteriously, she finds a pattern that connects the time between pulses to the stars’ distance from Earth. This period-luminosity relationship paves the way for the first-ever measurement of anything outside the Milky Way Galaxy.
In typical Skidmore fashion, Silent Sky has inspired several interdisciplinary events on campus, branching into art, exhibit curation, and gender and disability studies, as well as the more obvious connections to theater, science, and history.
One such event was a performance of several scenes of Silent Sky, featuring understudy Georgie Svrcek as Williamina, in the “Parallax: Framing the Cosmos” exhibit at the Tang Teaching Museum. The exhibit, available through June 2023, explores the history of U.S. space travel and the importance of differences in perspective.
“Beyond Page & Stage: Silent Sky through the lens of Disability Studies, Historiography, and Women in STEM” was a discussion panel curated by visiting Assistant Professor Aniko Szucs, Ph.D., featuring Alex Vermillion, Mary Crone Odekon, and Shayoni Mitra. The panel explored the astrophysics behind Silent Sky, the struggles of women in STEM at a time when they were often excluded from such fields, and Henrietta Leavitt’s identity as a hard-of-hearing woman. Without a doubt, Silent Sky is a profoundly interdisciplinary play that has inspired discussions about science, gender studies, and accessibility at Skidmore.