By Charlene Baldridge | Theater Review
On the heels of its magnificent “Shadowlands,” Lamb’s Players Theatre in Coronado continues its string of extraordinary productions with the San Diego premiere of Lauren Gunderson’s “Silent Sky,” an absolutely delectable, mind-expanding examination of the early days of women in astronomy.
The most-produced living American playwright in 2016, Gunderson has several works seen or about to be seen in San Diego theaters, among them “Emilie: La Marquise du Chatelet …” at New Village Arts last season, and “The Revolutionists” to be seen at Moxie Theatre in May.
Director Robert Smyth (Lamb’s producing artistic director) was shown “Silent Sky” by a colleague and immediately applied for the rights to produce it locally, which he does in gorgeous fashion with scenic design by Sean Fanning and a cast of five (four women).
Rachel VanWormer’s endearing performance as pioneering woman astronomer Henrietta Leavitt (1868-1921) is stunning, and her character’s unconsummated love affair with a socially gauche astronomer named Peter Shaw, played by her real-life husband Brian Mackey, is delicious fun.
Add to this the two other women “computers” (that’s what they were called) in the astronomy lab — Annie Canon (Cynthia Gerber) and Williamina Fleming (Deborah Gilmour Smyth) — a host of unseen but fully imagined additional characters, and Henrietta’s musical, married sister Margaret (Catie Grady), and the audience member finds herself royally entertained, entranced, and wanting more — more of this play, its characters and more of Gunderson.
When the historical Henrietta went to work at Harvard (in 1893 at age 25) scientists believed the Milky Way was the extent of the universe with earth most importantly its center.
In her job, which she spent her dowry to effect, Henrietta, a stargazer from childhood, began cataloguing the stars from photographic plates given her and the other computers by male astronomers, who were the only ones allowed to use Harvard’s Great Refractor Telescope, which was the largest in the United States for more than 20 years.
Leavitt’s discoveries gave scientists the means to measure the distance between stars and thus the size of the expanding universe. Don’t worry about the science: Lamb’s provides a helpful glossary.
Robert Smyth illuminates Gunderson’s text with keen direction of his assemblage. Jemima Dutra’s period costumes, which include suffragette “bloomers,” are wondrous, and Nathan Peirson’s lighting provides exactly what’s needed expansively. Deborah Gilmour Smyth provides sound design and original music.
Gunderson, who is based in the Bay Area, has a talent for mingling metaphors and revelations about scientific, poetic, human and even religious matters, sending shivers of recognition up one’s spine. Her language is glorious, her insight keen, and the play’s culmination, touching and inspired. It makes one glad to be alive in the cosmos.
—Charlene Baldridge has been writing about the arts since 1979. Follow her blog at charlenecriticism.blogspot.com or reach her at charb81@gmail.com.
