Silent Sky is a work of historical fiction in the tradition of Les Mis and The DaVinci Code. In this case, the playwright, Lauren Gunderson, takes as her subject an astronomer who worked at the Harvard Observatory between 1895 and her death in 1921. Mia Laboy Reyes, who stars in the play, offers this insight into her character and the play itself.
“The play chronicles the story of Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who was an astronomer in the 19th century, and it is a bit of a fictionalized retelling of her life because we all love a good drama. We love romance. But it chronicles the hardships she goes through, not only as a woman in STEM, but as a woman with a disability. She has hearing loss and, later, chronic illness. So, it’s really about the trials and tribulations women face in the STEM industry.”
While Henrietta Leavitt may be its subject, Silent Sky is a story about passion.
“The core theme of this show is passion and her passion for the work, her drive for it,” the play’s dramaturg, Robin O’Connell explains. “It really explores how much it drove her and invigorated her and led her to these fantastic discoveries and this phenomenal work.”
Enthralled as a child by the wonder of the stars, Henrietta Leavitt becomes obsessed with ascertaining Earth’s place in the vast and beautiful universe she sees in the Indiana night sky. In service of this Copernican quest, she’s undaunted by the obstacles thrown in her path, which include deafness, chronic illness and being denied access to the Big Refractor — the Harvard Observatory telescope — simply because she’s a woman.
Leavitt found her niche documenting a specific type of star that dims and brightens over a period of days, weeks and months. Much of the play is a lead up to the moment Leavitt finally figures out the significance of her growing list of blinking stars.
“The stars are music! When you put them in the right order … Oh my God, the blinking is music! So simple. Right there! [She found the pattern in Cepheid stars. The pulsing isn’t random.] The pulsing isn’t random. There is a pattern. The brightest stars take the longest to blink. It’s so simple!”
And with the discovery, Henrietta Leavitt accomplished what she set out to do – find our place in the universe.
“This can tell us how far it is, and if we know that, we can compare stars all across the sky and go from star to star across the deepest space until we know … exactly where we are!”
Ironically, until recently Henrietta Leavitt was denied her place within the field of astronomy. For much of the last century, Leavitt was a victim of the Matilda Effect.
“That is what happens when women’s work, particularly in STEM, particularly in the sciences, is attributed to a male supervisor, co-worker or colleague, dramaturg Robin O’Connell explains. “So it could either be them stealing a woman’s work or misattributing it or just not putting her name on it.”
In Henrietta Leavitt’s case, it wasn’t merely that her supervisor published her findings under his own name. It was more that he re-assigned her to another task so that she couldn’t pursue her research to where it ultimately led Edwin Hubble and the others who followed in her wake. And that — more than the lack of credit — is what really rankled the world’s greatest astronomer since Copernicus.
While some may raise a brow at Gunderson’s attempts to put a positive spin on the appropriation of Leavitt’s work to make further advances in the field of astronomy, that in no way detracts from the passion implicit in the story, the character or her portrayal by Mia Laboy Reyes. In Reyes, FGCU Program Coordinator, Associate Professor and Director Dan Bacalzo found the perfect actor to epitomize this crucial component of Silent Sky.
“What you notice in Mia’s performance is that Henrietta has passion and it’s her passion that drives the play,” assesses Bacalzo.
And in a month that includes Valentine’s Day, who couldn’t use a little more passion in their life?
Silent Sky is on stage at the FGCU Theatre Lab February 16 through the 25.
Go here for play dates and times.
Read more stories about the arts in Southwest Florida. Visit Tom Hall's website: SWFL Art in the News.
Audio is engineered and produced by WGCU's Tanner Jenni and Tara Calligan.
Spotlight on the Arts for WGCU is funded in part by Naomi Bloom, Jay & Toshiko Tompkins, and Julie & Phil Wade.
MORE INFORMATION:
- Henrietta Swan Leavitt was a Harvard "computer" — one of several women in the early 1900s who studied glass plates that contained photographs of the night sky taken by the Observatory’s male astronomers. Between 1907 and her death in 1921, Leavitt discovered roughly 2,400 variable or Cepheid stars. More, she observed a pattern in the period between the time they were brightest and dimmest which enabled American astronomer Edwin Hubble to measure the distance from Earth to the stars and various galaxies and led him to the realization that the universe is expanding.
- Leaviitt’s discoveries were fueled by her passion to ascertain our place within the universe. Toward that end, she sacrificed her family relationships, romance and her health.
- Discovering the pattern that she ultimately deduced from the blinking or variable stars she catalogued was no easy task. It eluded her for many years. The play contains a poignant scene in which she confesses her exasperation and despair to her colleague, Annie Jump Cannon, who tells her that she’s closer than she realizes.
- “I find that it’s often in the times where we experience so much hopelessness that the universe just gives us a sign,” comments Mia Laboy Reyes, who plays Henrietta. “The universe throws us a bone, and it’s like here [you go]. I think something similar happens to Henrietta. She is so engulfed in her work, and the answer she was looking for was right in front of her the whole time.”
- While many people are driven by the prospect of fame and recognition, Silent Sky depicts a woman who is driven instead by her thirst for knowledge and the adrenaline rush of scientific discovery. While Silent Sky is a fictional dramatization of Henrietta Leavitt’s quest to discern our place in the universe, dramaturg Robin O’Connell says her research reveals a “humble woman who was devoted to the work, more interested in the solutions of science than her own personal gratification, her own acclaim.”
- The character of Henrietta Leavitt is also featured in The Women Who Mapped the Stars, which is being performed by Theatre Conspiracy at the Alliance for the Arts in the Planetarium at Calusa Nature Center. In that production, Leavitt is characterized as a woman who accepts the fact that the male astronomers at Harvard Observatory control the course of her work and the disposition of her work product. So she consoles herself by taking pride in her research and the results that it yields.
- However, the other characters who appear in The Women Who Mapped the Stars are less stoic and more vocal about being deprived of due credit for their discoveries. In addition to Henrietta Leavitt, that play features Williamina Fleming, Antonia Maury, Annie Jump Cannon and Cecilia Payne. You can learn about their discoveries here.
- Silent Sky creates a romantic interest for Henrietta Leavitt in the guise of Peter Shaw. However, dramaturg Robin O’Connell points out that there’s no evidence in the historical record that Henrietta ever had a romantic relationship. “Peter Shaw is representative of the patriarchal system that controls Henrietta and her colleagues.” Thus, it is fitting that he spurns her in Act Two of the play. Of course, the character of Peter Shaw is more nuanced than being merely a stand-in for the patriarchal attitude that permeated the field of astronomy during the timeframe of the play.
- In addition to creating a love interest for Henrietta in Silent Sky, playwright Lauren Gunderson also give her an adult sister. Dramaturg Robin O’Connell points out that none of Henrietta’s sisters actually survived to adulthood, including her sister Margaret. But Gunderson has a very specific reason for creating an adult sister for Henrietta. “Gunderson divides Henrietta into two parts, and she gives Margaret Henrietta’s love of music and her devotion to family and her love of faith and God and church,” points out dramaturg Robin O’Connell. “By contrast, Henrietta is very meticulous, very scientific, very reasoned, very sound, very driven by the empirical and the verifiable, everything that’s factual. So [Gunderson] split the character into two in order for people to understand, I guess, the nuance and complexity of Henrietta as a character because she’s so … Henrietta fills the page. You know, she’s everything and so by putting her into two characters you could see the tension and the pull between Henrietta’s scientific life and her family life.”
To read more stories about the arts in Southwest Florida visit Tom Hall's website: SWFL Art in the News.
